Information Wants To Be Free has a great series of posts, The Failure of Middleware.
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 1: What’s the Problem?
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 2: Who are our users?
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 3: How do we measure up?
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 4: What works?
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 5: The Unintegrated Library System & Federated Search
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 6: Link Resolvers
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 7: OAI and Google Scholar
“In many libraries, we see collections that do not meet the needs of their users. This problem can affect small rural public libraries with limited budgets and prestigious academic libraries that have comprehensive print and electronic holdings. It’s easy to understand the problem of limited funds, but if a library has an excellent collection why would it fall short in meeting the needs of the library’s patrons? What’s the problem? Information literacy is obviously important, but we should not simply teach the students to conform to an imperfect system. We should be making the system conform to the needs of the students and faculty. “
Just watching This Screencast is priceless, the rest is great reading.
Information Wants To Be Free has a great series of posts, The Failure of Middleware.
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 1: What’s the Problem?
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 2: Who are our users?
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 3: How do we measure up?
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 4: What works?
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 5: The Unintegrated Library System & Federated Search
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 6: Link Resolvers
- The Failure of Middleware, Part 7: OAI and Google Scholar
“In many libraries, we see collections that do not meet the needs of their users. This problem can affect small rural public libraries with limited budgets and prestigious academic libraries that have comprehensive print and electronic holdings. It’s easy to understand the problem of limited funds, but if a library has an excellent collection why would it fall short in meeting the needs of the library’s patrons? What’s the problem? Information literacy is obviously important, but we should not simply teach the students to conform to an imperfect system. We should be making the system conform to the needs of the students and faculty. “
Just watching This Screencast is priceless, the rest is great reading.
screencast
Why didn’t he just use the keyword search? Its right there in the list of options.
I’m not sure I agree with using federated searches. The Internet is sometimes described as a library with all the books thrown into a pile. A federated search seems to be the process of taking the books off the shelf and throwing them in said pile.