Monday, October 17, 2016

For any organization with significant digital content, the ability to search across this content has become an operational necessity. Regardless of the specific search system utilized by an organization, effective enterprise search requires some manual review and editing in order to produce the most relevant results. Mathieu looks at the current trends and issues surrounding enterprise search by presenting a case study of the library’s efforts to manually “curate” search at JPL, a world leader in robotic deep-space planetary missions, advanced observatories for exoplanets and astrophysics, Earth monitoring systems, and associated science and technology. She discusses an open-source search tool, Elasticsearch, recently initiated to improve internal search, which is used to index intranet web content as well as content from a disparate range of internal document, image, and data repositories. Get an overview of search curation efforts, tools and metrics used, some best practices and lessons learned. CSU speakers discuss how discovery layers have changed the ways in which students are able to search academic library resources by providing a simplified, customizable user interface. They studied student participants who executed searches in two discovery layer configurations and an indexing and abstracting database. While students reported a preference for discovery layers, the articles selected from the indexing and abstracting database were more authoritative. These results illuminate the relative strengths of these tools, informing decisions about resource allocation and discovery configuration.