News - The new faceted metadata searching catalog at the Smithsonian Institution

The new faceted metadata searching catalog

On August 1, 2007, the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System (SIRIS) implemented the first deployment of a revolutionary new online catalog that allows users to search across 1.8 million of the Institution’s library, archive, and research holdings. Using the latest indexing technology, the new SIRIS Cross Catalog Searching Center provides easy "one-stop searching" of these records. The rich contents, combined with the fast and flexible searching capabilities, make this new catalog a useful research tool. This catalog allows users to browse and select information quickly and provides real-time automatic guides to related terms.

Within the more than 1.8 million records, the SIRIS Cross Catalog Searching Center also provides access to over 190,000 online media assets including digitized photographs and art works, oral history sound files, electronic journals, online exhibitions, digitized manuscripts, language recordings, and online finding aids.

The search result screen is divided into a Guide/Limit option section and a search result section. After the user submits a search, the following choices are provided:

• A summary list from the search is displayed in the right side the screen. Each record is listed based on its relevancy ranking, and each includes a brief display of content and an image (if one exists). The user can click on the title of a record to view a fuller version of the record, or can click on an image to view a large version of the image.

• A content-sensitive navigation guide for each search is displayed on the left side of the screen. The guide consists of the following sections: Type of material, Subject, Name, Date, Place, Culture, Language, and Data Source. Relevant faceted terms are listed under each section and the user can click on any term to filter and refine the search results. The user can cancel any faceted terms individually with a single click and the search result will be refreshed accordingly.

• Online media files get the royal treatment in this catalog. They not only receive higher ranking status for relevancy ranking, these documents also have special display options designed with media files in mind. The user may choose either a list view or a grid view display format for quick browsing.

The Technology

In implementing this new Cross Catalog Searching Center, SIRIS reviewed a number of commercial and open-source products. The functional requirements included the support of faceted metadata searching, Boolean / simple search logic, synonym/stemming matching, proximity matching, customizable relevance ranking, and highlighting display capability. The Cross Catalog Searching Center system will need to support not only library materials but a wide range of archival, research and museum document types. In the end, the Smithsonian selected the Lucene indexing software and its companion Solr search and retrieval software for the project.

The Lucene/Solr search engine has offered the Smithsonian a flexible and scalable indexing environment to support the fast growing online collections served in the new Cross Catalog Searching Center. The Smithsonian has refined and enhanced the online display by programming in a Java environment. MARC records from several databases were extracted and mapped to a common data format and ingested into the Lucene index. Future ingests are planned from other data sources with different formats.

The new online catalog is in keeping with the Institution’s thrust to digitize its collections making them available to a worldwide audience.

Contact:

For more information, please send email to siris@si.edu.