MetaLib

During the last session of the afternoon, I attended "The Implementation of MetaLib at the University of Wisconsin-Madison" presented by Todd Bruns, Collection Development, UW-Madison; Sue Dentinger, General Library System Library Technical Group, UW-Madison; and Amy Kindschi, College of Engineering, UW-Madison.

MetaLib is both a Content Management System for electronic resources and a metasearching tool. Madison organized their resources into 18 categories with (I think) 171 sub-categories within what they call the E-Resource Gateway (http://metalib.wisconsin.edu/V/?func=change-portal-1&portal-name=MADISON). With Guest access, you can only look at the framework and the categories, but it's worth seeing how they've laid it out.

The QuickSearch feature for resource discovery got a "soft rollout" because they weren't sure how it would be received, but people seemed to really like it, so they did a full implementation (see above link) and it's proved to be even more popular.

Because metasearching is done in real time, it can bog down and grind to a halt if a lot of people are searching at once (in a classroom situation, for instance). But the whole issue of teaching metasearching to unsuspecting patrons is somewhat controversial.

Reasons not to teach metasearching:
- you lose controlled vocabulary (aieee!) and special features of the "native database"
- there are reasons to be suspicious of precision and recall of metasearch results
- not all databases can be metasearched
- it's difficult to do author searching
- it's even harder to distinguish between scholarly and popular stuff

Reasons to teach metasearching:
- it's great for resource discovery
- you can quickly see which resources have the highest results
- students and faculty seem to like it -- a lot
- it's good for quick citation verification
- many metasearch skills transfer to native databases: boolean, truncation, field limiters, etc.

One librarian quoted remarked that if metasearching encourages even shallow engagement with our purchased databases (rather than Google), it's worth it.

Early indications are that students seem to understand that they need to go to the native databases; that the metasearch is really a starting point. Which is a good sign...

More later.