Chapter 2 - The evolution of the search systems

Abstract

In the first chapter, we start from the innovation of the OPACs, especially considering the past 10 or 15 years, debating a series of considerations particularly in favor of the development of interfaces in line with Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web principles, which has often been voiced to support features such as maximal friendliness and usability, interactive and collaborative organization, interoperability, and granularity of information and data. Then we discuss that at least in recent years the point of view of the more or less provocative, more or less reflective writings related to web-scale discovery services (WSDS) has become more critical, more “investigative,” and closer to the actual object on which to reflect: how to integrate old and new tools for the search and retrieval of information and resources. It is observed that behind a careful and conscious development of new elements, there may well be the exaltation of the classical principles of library work, as well as of bibliographic work, which “agreeing” with technologies finds the direction to best apply themselves to today's reality and the transformations of society. Finally, we present the world and the various issues of WSDS and discovery tools, which begins beyond the different types of OPACs that evolved toward the Web, beyond the federated search systems, or metasearch—which were the first to integrate the search in the catalog with that in other databases, and, beyond the next-generation catalogs. A characteristic of these new tools is the creation of a “single index” of the data and metadata of the resources selected and made available by the library. The index is efficiently used by a single interface, with good characteristics of simplicity and friendliness, and allows the widest searches among the resources of different databases to be carried out in a single solution, and, consequently a single list of results is.