New Initiatives

We had a good SELCO board meeting Wednesday night. I received my "23 things on a stick" flash drive, and my name was drawn out of the hat for a DVD player. That was a cool surprise! There was good discussion about the new Strategic Plan for the consortium. I'm particularly excited about the Teen programming component. We also decided to go ahead and take a serious look at creating a new catalog utilizing Endeca.

Endeca is a great product used by a lot of large e-commerce companies. I'm glad everyone seems excited about it, but I think we still need to take a look at the alternatives as well. Solr is a similar open source project that is used by a lot of large e-commerce companies as well. It's not as slick as Endeca, but I think it is worth a look as well. Here are some links if anyone is curious.

Here is a list of sites using it for their guided navigation/search.
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/PublicServers

There are some pretty big sites in that list.
http://reviews.cnet.com/
http://shopper.cnet.com/
http://www.netflix.com/
http://www.archive.org/

I do see some libraries in the list as well.
http://deweybrowser.oclc.org/ddcbrowser2/
http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/index.html
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/digital/resndev/blacklight.html
http://siris-collections.si.edu/search/results.jsp

I also think we should be looking at AquaBrowser as well. They are a more library specific company. They've built a lot of the social aspects into their product. They do things like import LibraryThing tags and reviews, and allow patrons to do tagging, reviewing, and networking. Definitely worth a serious look. Plenty of libraries in their list of customers.