Aquabrowser

I mentioned in the meeting yesterday that Streamline may want to look at Aquabrowser which is a novel resource discovery platform that the library has been looking at recently.

The screenshot below is from a library site running the software and shows results for “fox”; on the right hand side results are returned in a traditional manner; the “discover” pane on the left hand side is the clever bit which positions your search string at the centre of a colour coded web of association; spelling variation; translation; thesaurus terms; discovery trail.  A user can click on an association which is pulled into the center of the web; the search results on the right are modified accordingly so if I click on “desert” my results comprise “The desert fox” and “The Black Rock Desert” by William. L. Fox etc

To have a go visit:

http://aqua.queenslibrary.org/

April’s Meeting

A new team member joined the group for this week’s meeting. This was very useful as it allowed him to ask ‘innocent’ questions from a position of relative ignorance about the project and allowed the rest of us to clarify some of the confusions we have because we often see only our piece of the project. For example, we discussed the topic of Resource Discovery and I think we agreed (though my colleagues will no doubt correct my latest ‘confusion’) that the basic approaches to Resource Discovery – as it relates to Learning Objects in particular – are:

1. Searching any metadata (and in terms of the Streamline project, hopefully this means appropriate and reliable metadata that has been automatically generated).
2. Semantic analysis of content (Google Plus?)
3. Peer recommendation/Social Networking.

Now, it was worth attending the meeting just to clarify that … but it wouldn’t have been clarified without a project newbie!