Yale/Arcadia Report now Available
Daniel Lovins
not to have gone through.)
Dear nrs4lib colleagues,
The attached report is the result of a 6-month study funded by the
Arcadia Foundation. We’re grateful to members of this group who took
the time to answer our questions and share their knowledge, which much
improved the quality and usefulness of the report. In addition to
addressing the challenge of access to non-Roman script materials at
Yale, the report attempts to establish a common basic understanding of
the many facets of this challenge, e.g., the complexities of language
processing, implications of cataloging practice and the significance
of the Lucene\Solr search engine in this problem space. We hope that
this work will benefit our colleagues here at Yale, the larger
community of academic research libraries, and any other groups and
individuals working on these issues.
Here’s a brief synopsis of the report: We review the history of
non-Roman scripts in the Yale Library catalog, tracing the evolution
of our descriptive metadata practices and our ongoing interest in
optimizing access through our discovery applications -- Orbis
(Voyager) and Yufind (VuFind). We discuss the importance of providing
such access, both in terms of user requirements and cataloging trends.
We examine gaps in current technology, what other libraries are doing
to bridge those gaps, and whether commercial solutions are available.
We list several recommendations, that, should they be implemented,
would provide substantial improvements in non-Roman search, retrieval
and display capabilities at relatively modest cost.
Let me know if you have any comments or questions. I’ll let you all
know whether and/or to what extent our recommendations are accepted at
Yale as well as any proposals for collaboration that emerge.
Incidentally, Jeff Barnett and I will be presenting some of our
group's findings at the Lucene Revolution conference in Boston (Oct.
5-8, 2010).
Sincerely,
Daniel