Seeding search engines with data from the Australian National Bibliographic Database Tony Boston Assistant Director-General Resource Sharing National Library of Australia 18 September 2006

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Seeding search engines with data from the
Australian National Bibliographic DatabaseTony
BostonAssistant Director-GeneralResource
SharingNational Library of Australia18
September 2006
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Outline

• Why seed search engines?
• National Library Digital Collections
• Libraries Australia and the ANBD
• Results to date
• Future directions

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Why seed search engines?

• To provide new discovery pathways for users of
  Australian libraries and increase exposure of the
  Libraries Australia Search service on the Internet

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Why people use search engines

• Self-service, satisfaction, seamlessness1
• 89 of US college students start research process
  via Search Engines1
• Principle of Least Effort2
• Poor design of library systems, eg complexity,
  lack of relevance ranking3
• 12003 OCLC environmental scan Pattern
  recognition. C. De Rosa, L. Dempsey and A. Wilson
  January 2004
• 2Improving user access to library catalog and
  portal information final report. M. J. Bates
  2003
• 3Rethinking How We provide Bibliographic Services
  for the University of California. Final report
  December 2005 Bibliographic Services Task Force

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National Library Digital Collections

• 100,000 items from the Librarys collection
  digitised since 1996.
• Pictures, maps, sheet music, manuscripts, some
  books and serials

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More pathways, more users

• Three major pathways to collection items
• Via the Librarys catalogue
• Via federated discovery services, eg Libraries
  Australia, MusicAustralia, PictureAustralia
• Via Internet search engines
• URL lists for search engines to harvest
• Persistent URLs resolve to a page to be indexed,
  eg
• http//nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an22948286

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Search engine indexing and access paths
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Libraries Australia and the ANBD

• Free Libraries Australia Search service
• Launched by Senator Helen Coonan on 27 February
  2006
• Freely available to anyone with Internet access
• Easy to use, google like search
• Records exported to Search Engines
• March 2006 700,000 records matched to Google
  Scholar
• Simple XML format
• July 2006 1.4 M records matched to Google
  Scholar
• MARCXML format
• August 2006 Records added to Google Book Search
• End 2006 Records in main google.com and
  yahoo.com index

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Googles Union Catalogue Program

• Data obtained from 12 union catalogues
• Australia, China, Czech Republic, Denmark,
  Ireland, Israel, Hungary, Lithuania, Netherlands,
  Taiwan, United Kingdom and United States
  (WorldCat),
• Links to union catalogues vary based on IP
  address of user
• Issues
• Unique material
• Matching algorithm
• Trust, profit and motivation

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Libraries and the long tail

• 80 of people want just 20 of any collection
• 80 of the collection requested rarely
• The long tail of sporadic usage
• Represents a new business model gt NetFlix
• Fewer, larger resources gt Union Catalogues
• Better fulfilment home delivery, universal Get
  it button
• Project library services into Web 2.0 world

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Future directions

• Enhancements to Libraries Australia
• Relevance Ranking
• Clustering and faceted browsing
• Annotation and links to value added services
• Improved getting
• Exposure of the ANBD in google.com, yahoo.com
• Libraries Australia search box
• Relationship with OCLC and Open WorldCat

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Libraries Australia search box
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Conclusions

• Seeding search engines generates
• More discovery pathways gt more users
• Union catalogues support
• The business of libraries
• Comprehensiveness gt Exposing the long tail
• More specialised services beyond search engines
• Improved getting of items