Belgian ‘meta-union’ catalogue in Belgian. Were real problems with sharing metadata across regions – political interference meant that not all regions/libraries included.
Wanted a ‘next gen’ OPAC – various reasons:
- Users like mouse, not keyboard
- Surveys show satisfaction is higher than traditional OPAC … and
- We ‘love’ New York public library’s OPAC
W3Line developed Samarcande. From technical point of view…
Challenges:
- High volumes of bibliographic data coming from several origins
- Create an intelligent database with FRBR scheme
- Search functionalit: advanced search, facets, tags
- Social network services (web 2.0)
- Give internal and external services
Samarcande is a catalogue of catalogues – 7 partners
- 6 union catalogues
- Plus database of journal articl references
- Variety of bibliographic description
- Lack of shared rules or authorities (except for subject headings)
Totally impossible to do virtual search – have to aggregate records in an unique database.
- Detect identical references – keeping local information
- Keep the best of each reference (summaries, subject headings)
- Keep all identifiers in order to propose retun links to original catalogue
- Develop connectors to import and index the data
- Get data from web services
- Answer to SRU/SRW requests
Includes search functionalities:
- Advanced search / autocompletion
- Did you mean
- Results by relevance
- Facets
- Tag cloud
- Historic, reference basket, results by mail
- Search profiles, bibliographies
FRBR
- Gather editions of the same publication
- based on author-title key as lack of any other identifier
- Social network contents attaches at the ‘work’ level
Samarcande built on
- mysql, jquery, php, solr
- moccam for ILL
- …