LIBER 39TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE - Statsbiblioteket

PREsEntatIon By ouR sPonsoR
tamaR sadEh, (EX LIBRIs, uk):
moRE Is dIffEREnt: mEgaaggREgatIon
of schoLaRLy
matERIaLs and Its ImPact on thE
sEaRch EXPERIEncE
With the advances in scholarly communication
in recent years, the academic
research world is becoming more global
and collaborative. E-Science, for example,
has introduced scientific projects on a
whole new scale in terms of collaborative
effort, the dissemination of information,
technical infrastructure, and the amount
of data that is generated. In this global
environment, scholars’ quest for information
transcends borders; indeed, every
research document, no matter where it
was created, can be accessed globally
and its impact can be felt widely.
Continuing to fulfill their role, information
providers publish the growing quantity of
quality materials and disseminate them to
institutions around the world. Institutions,
for their part, strive to offer their users as
many relevant information resources as
can feasibly be provided, given budgetary
constraints, and to facilitate searching
in these resources.
The availability of the Internet as a vehicle
for publishing scholarly materials, on the
one hand, and for locating such materials,
on the other, offers the academic information
community several approaches
to searching in heterogeneous information
resources: a networked approach, a centralized
approach, or a combination of
the two. The networked approach adheres
to the fundamental concept of the Internet
whereby information items are linked to
each other regardless of physical location
and can hence be organized into one
conceptual entity by a software system or
a user. A centralized approach—adopted
by search engines such as Google—relies
on indexing of the Internet; a user who
seeks information searches the index.
Whereas the former approach eliminates
the duplication of data and the need for
preprocessing, the latter approach generates
very quick responses to queries and
excellent relevance ranking.
The scholarly environment follows the
trends of the consumer market for global
information. Over the last decade, we
have witnessed the rise of metasearch
systems that follow the networked approach.
Such systems gather relevant
information from diverse information
resources as a response to a researcher’s
query and use centralized configuration
information as a basis for the interaction
30 JunE 2010
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