Single Search Box Research Articles

Machado: Open source genomics data integration framework.

BackgroundGenome projects and multiomics experiments generate huge volumes of data that must be stored, mined, and transformed into useful knowledge. All this information is supposed to be accessible and, if possible, browsable afterwards. Computational biologists have been dealing with this scenario for more than a decade and have been implementing software and databases to meet this challenge. The GMOD's (Generic Model Organism Database) biological relational database schema, known as Chado, is one of the few successful open source initiatives; it is widely adopted and many software packages are able to connect to it.FindingsWe have been developing an open source software package named Machado, a genomics data integration framework implemented in Python, to enable research groups to both store and visualize genomics data. The framework relies on the Chado database schema and, therefore, should be very intuitive for current developers to adopt it or have it running on top of already existing databases. It has several data-loading tools for genomics and transcriptomics data and also for annotation results from tools such as BLAST, InterproScan, OrthoMCL, and LSTrAP. There is an API to connect to JBrowse, and a web visualization tool is implemented using Django Views and Templates. The Haystack library integrated with the ElasticSearch engine was used to implement a Google-like search, i.e., single auto-complete search box that provides fast results and filters.ConclusionMachado aims to be a modern object-relational framework that uses the latest Python libraries to produce an effective open source resource for genomics research.

The Relationship Between Dictionary Look-up Frequency and Corpus Frequency Revisited: A Log-File Analysis of a Decade of User Interaction with a Swahili-English Dictionary

In an earlier publication it was claimed that there is no useful relationship between Swahili-English dictionary look-up frequencies and the occurrence frequencies for the same wordforms in Swahili-English corpora, at least not beyond the top few thousand wordforms. This result was challenged using data for German by a different team of researchers using an improved methodology. In the present article the original Swahili-English data is revisited, using ten years’ worth of it rather than just two, and using the improved methodology. We conclude that there is indeed a positive relationship. In addition, we show that online dictionary look-up behaviour is remarkably similar across languages, even when, as in our case, one is dealing with languages from very dissimilar language families. Furthermore, online dictionaries turn out to have minimum look-up success rates, below which they simply cannot go. These minima are language-sensitive and vary depending on the regularity of the searched-for entries, but are otherwise constant no matter the size of randomly sampled dictionaries. Corpus-informed sampling always improves on any random method. Lastly, from the point of view of the graphical user interface, we argue that the average user of an online bilingual dictionary is better served with a single search box, rather than separate search boxes for each dictionary side.

In the Wake of Discovery: Student Perceptions, Integration, and Instructional Design

Academic libraries have increasingly adopted web-scale discovery tools in order to meet the expectations of students who want immediate results, efficient algorithms, and a single search box. As they have become the de facto search tool at many libraries, librarians and patrons alike have been forced to confront the way they think about research processes and in some cases, modulate ingrained habits. In this article, the authors explore student perceptions of efficacy, relevancy, and ease of use of a library discovery tool through a 2017 mixed-methods user experience study conducted at three City University of New York (CUNY) campuses. The results from this user study will be useful to other institutions that already have implemented discovery layers within their library and help inform website design, discovery layer design, and pedagogy. By combining student interviews with a task analysis, the authors were able to learn more about student search behaviors, how they respond to challenges, and what they expect from search tools. Identifying these barriers to student use of the Primo discovery tool has helped us articulate best practices for instruction and interface customization that may address these barriers and has illuminated implications for website integration.

Discovery and the Disciplines: An Inquiry into the Role of Subject Databases through Citation Analysis

Libraries have adopted web scale discovery services with the goal of providing their users with a streamlined research experience. However, the single search box that characterizes web scale discovery is one option among many that libraries continue to provide, including subject databases and other legacy tools. Libraries lack evidence regarding which of these tools are best suited to the various stages and levels of expertise that may characterize a user’s research process. A case study approach, focusing on the field of academic history, is employed to test the discoverability of a subset of scholarly work across several search platforms.

Web-Scale Discovery Service in Academic Library Environment

Web-Scale Discovery service is the new buzzword of library service in the current environment. It refers to a group of products that index a wide number of resources in various formats and allows users to search for content in the physical collection, print and electronic journals collections, and other resources from a single search box. It has the capacity to connect the researchers more easily with the vast information repository of the library including both locally and hosted content i.e. physical holdings, digital collection, and local institutional repositories. This article defines the concept of Web-Scale Discovery Service and its features. The author tries to illustrate the evaluation process for implementing Web-Scale Discovery Service. He also outlines some of important steps involved while execution.

English

OAI-PMH-enabled open source digital library software, such as DSpace, EPrints, VuFind, Drupal OAI harvester, and PKP harvester, have made it possible to harvest massive metadata from different IDRs. IT brought new hope and opportunities for providing various new services to our library users. This article attempts to explore the tools, techniques, and significant challenges for largescale metadata harvesting and metadata curation. A recent bibliographic study of Scopus has shown that there is a rapid increase in publication of articles over the last two decades. “A total of 25, 482 publications represent the literary output in different formats, in different subjects, and from various nations” (ul Ajaz Wani and Gul 2008). All these preprint academic research documents, such as conference papers, journal articles, annual reports, protocols, and lecture notes may be already uploaded or need to be uploaded in various institutional digital repositories (IDRs) for long-term digital preservation and reuse. In this study, we have harvested the metadata from different such IDRs into a centrally indexed repository for providing a single window search box. Therefore, with this, we may dream that the day is not far away when we will not need any e-resource subscriptions, as those will be available in our IDR. It will indeed be a great achievement and will be extremely helpful to the academic community. However, along with this, a continuous metadata curation is a major intermediate phase, which focusses on the proper mapping of data to metadata. Programmatic curation and manual curation are the two processes conducted for final curation of the harvested metadata, where both have their own merits and demerits. This article further focusses on the process workflow of metadata data curation, and the possible challenges to be managed by the librarian for proper indexing of the items.

Evaluating federated search tools: usability and retrievability framework

Purpose– This study aims to explore a framework for evaluating and comparing two federated search tools (FSTs) using two different retrieval protocols: XML gateways and Z39.50. FSTs are meta-information retrieval systems developed to facilitate the searching of multiple resources through a single search box. FSTs allow searching of heterogeneous platforms, such as bibliographic and full-text databases, online public access catalogues, web search engines and open-access resources.Design/methodology/approach– The proposed framework consists of three phases: the usability testing, retrievability performance assessment and overall comparison. The think-aloud protocol was implemented for usability testing and FSTs retrieval consistency, and precision tests were carried out to assess the retrievability performance for 20 real user queries.Findings– Participants were directed to assign weights for the interface usability and system retrievability importance as indicators for FST evaluation. Results indicated that FSTs retrievability performance was of more importance than the interface usability. Participants assigned an average weight of 62 per cent for the system retrievability and 38 per cent for interface usability. In terms of the usability test, there was no significant difference between the two FSTs, while minor differences were found regarding retrieval consistency and precision at 11-point cut-off recall. The overall evaluation showed that the FST based on the XML gateway rated slightly higher than the FST based on the Z39.50 protocol.Research limitations/implications– This empirical study faced several limitations. First, the lack of participants’ familiarity with usability testing created the need for a deep awareness and rigorous supervision. Second, the difficulties of empirically assessing participants’ perspectives and future attitudes called for mixing between a formal task and the think-aloud protocol for participants in a real environment. This has been a challenge that faced the collection of the usability data including user behaviour, expectations and other empirical data. Third, the differences between the two FSTs in terms of number of connectors and advanced search techniques required setting rigorous procedures for testing FSTs retrieval consistency and precision.Practical implications– This paper has practical implications in two dimensions. First, its results could be utilized by FST developers to enhance their product’s performance. Second, the framework could be used by librarians to evaluate FSTs performance and capabilities. The framework enables them to compare between library systems in general and FSTs in particular. In addition to these practical implications, the authors encourage researchers to use and enhance the proposed framework.Social implications– Librarians can use the proposed framework to empirically select an FST, involving users in the selection procedures of these information retrieval systems, so that it accords with users’ perspectives and attitudes and serves the community better.Originality/value– The proposed framework could be considered a benchmark for FST evaluation.

The benefits of resource discovery for publishers: a librarian's view

A core goal of librarians is to maximize usage of the content to which their libraries subscribe. Webscale or resource discovery systems offer a single search box for library users to access subscribed content. This article examines usage data at the University of Huddersfield to show how resource discovery has helped to increase the usage of publisher content that has been made available to discovery vendors, and considers the implications for publishers who are yet to do this. The article concludes that resource discovery systems have effectively levelled the playing field, allowing small to medium-sized publishers to make content discoverable to users, and encourages publishers who do not have their content indexed in resource discovery systems to speak to discovery service vendors in order to do so at the earliest opportunity.

Library Users Attempt to Access a Wide Range of Information Beyond Books and Articles through a Single Search Box

A Review of:
 Lown, C., Sierra, T., & Boyer, J. (2013). How users search the library from a single search box. College & Research Libraries, 74(3), 227-241. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/crl-321
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – To identify how users use a single search box.
 
 Design – Transaction log analysis.
 
 Setting – A large research university in North Carolina, United States of America.
 
 Subjects – Search results from a customized single search box on the library’s home page, consisting of 739,180 searches and 655,388 hyperlink selections.
 
 Methods – The authors used custom logging software to generate transaction logs of all searches that took place over two semesters (August to December 2010 and January to May 2011) in QuickSearch, a custom-made, combined search application. The study tracked search queries and hyperlink selections, noting which modules in the discovery interface (articles, catalogue, databases, and others) were selected and, from these modules, which hyperlinks were clicked. 
 
 Main Results – Transaction log analysis was conducted on over 739,000 searches during the two semesters and over 655,000 hyperlink selections from the results interface. The 20 most frequent queries made in QuickSearch were primarily for specific resources (database titles or journal titles), administrative information, and library services. The 153 most popular searches made up 10% of all searches. Hyperlinks to full-text articles (41.5%) and the catalogue (35.2%) accounted for about 76% of the links selected. About 23% of links selected were for other modules (e.g., FAQs, “best bets,” and journal titles). Hyperlinks that led directly to specific items were selected more frequently than hyperlinks to a full list of results.
 
 Conclusion – Analysis of user transaction logs suggests that users do not understand what is being searched in a combined search box and that search applications need to direct users more effectively to resources beyond the catalogue and article databases. Users attempt to access a wide range of information from a single search box, and the most commonly used modules in QuickSearch do not serve many of the most frequent queries. Many of the most common queries can be defined and addressed with a predefined list of results, improving the quality of results and the search experience for users. Ongoing evaluation and analysis of the search interface and subsequent optimization for the most frequent queries can improve user experience.

Rice DB: an Oryza Information Portal linking annotation, subcellular location, function, expression, regulation, and evolutionary information for rice and Arabidopsis.

Omics research in Oryza sativa (rice) relies on the use of multiple databases to obtain different types of information to define gene function. We present Rice DB, an Oryza information portal that is a functional genomics database, linking gene loci to comprehensive annotations, expression data and the subcellular location of encoded proteins. Rice DB has been designed to integrate the direct comparison of rice with Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), based on orthology or ‘expressology’, thus using and combining available information from two pre-eminent plant models. To establish Rice DB, gene identifiers (more than 40 types) and annotations from a variety of sources were compiled, functional information based on large-scale and individual studies was manually collated, hundreds of microarrays were analysed to generate expression annotations, and the occurrences of potential functional regulatory motifs in promoter regions were calculated. A range of computational subcellular localization predictions were also run for all putative proteins encoded in the rice genome, and experimentally confirmed protein localizations have been collated, curated and linked to functional studies in rice. A single search box allows anything from gene identifiers (for rice and/or Arabidopsis), motif sequences, subcellular location, to keyword searches to be entered, with the capability of Boolean searches (such as AND/OR). To demonstrate the utility of Rice DB, several examples are presented including a rice mitochondrial proteome, which draws on a variety of sources for subcellular location data within Rice DB. Comparisons of subcellular location, functional annotations, as well as transcript expression in parallel with Arabidopsis reveals examples of conservation between rice and Arabidopsis, using Rice DB (http://ricedb.plantenergy.uwa.edu.au).

EResources in Academic Libraries: A Look Ahead

Tim Collins, President and Founder, EBSCO Publishing, presented “eResources in Academic Libraries: A Look Ahead” at the eResource & Emerging Technologies Summit held at Mississippi State University Libraries on August 3, 2012. Collins presented EBSCO's strategy for creating the single search box and the philosophy behind their Discovery Service. He provided information on the different types of content providers and the search capabilities of their Discovery Service. Collins also presented information regarding eBooks on EBSCOhost and what they have done since acquiring NetLibrary.

How Users Search the Library from a Single Search Box

Academic libraries are turning increasingly to unified search solutions to simplify search and discovery of library resources. Unfortunately, very little research has been published on library user search behavior in single search box environments. This study examines how users search a large public university library using a prominent, single search box on the library website. The article examines two semesters of real-world data, totaling nearly 1.4 million transactions. Findings include that unified library search is about more than the catalog and articles, though these predominate. Additionally, a small number of the most popular search queries accounts for a disproportionate amount of the overall queries. Also discussed are the merits of ongoing evaluation of library user search behavior.

Evaluation of Web Discovery Services: Reflections from Turkey

After the occurrence of Google and failure of federated search engines against Google, web discovery services appeared as a savior for libraries. Main importance of web discovery services is a google-like single search box, speed and comprehensiveness. This study aims an overview for web discovery services and analyzing the use and awareness of these services in Turkey. Web Discovery Services are used by 52 of the Turkish universities, 39 state universities and 13 private universities (August 2012). Ebsco Discovery Service (EDS) and Serial Solutions Summon are most commonly used discovery services in Turkey. EDS have 101 users (31 Universities, 3 Institutions, 1 Military Institution of Higher Education and 66 Ministry of Health Training and Research Hospitals), Summon have 21 users that all are universities. The other two discovery services, OCLC Worldcat Local, Encore Synergy and Primo Central don’t have any user in Turkey library market for now. According to the results of the conducted survey (February 2012) to all 160 higher education institutions in Turkey, 63 of the 74 respondents have information about web discovery services. About half of the 39 nonuser institutions attempted for using a discovery service.

Discovery: The Information Literate WorldCat

Discovery: The Information Literate WorldCat

An Introduction to Web Scale Discovery Systems

This article explores the basic principles of web-scale discovery systems and how they are being implemented in libraries. “Web scale discovery” refers to a class of products that index a vast number of resources in a wide variety formats and allow users to search for content in the physical collection, print and electronic journal collections, and other resources from a single search box. Search results are displayed in a manner similar to Internet searches, in a relevance ranked list with links to online content. The advantages and disadvantages of these systems are discussed, and a list of popular discovery products is provided. A list of library websites with discovery systems currently implemented is also provided.

A machine for browsing: beyond the “single search box”

PurposeThis paper seeks to discuss the possibility of reviving browsing as an access framework in the midst of the “single search box” phenomenon.Design/methodology/approachThe paper provides an overview of recent trends in the implementation of “single search” products and contrasts this with the emergence of the Linked Open Data framework.FindingsThe paper suggests that the Linked Open Data framework will provide an important platform for reviving browsing as an alternative to searching in information systems.Originality/valueThe paper aims to stimulate further discussion about the relative importance of browsing and searching, as well as about the implementation of the Linked Open Data framework.

Maximize Discovery and Minimize Cost

This article explores how medical libraries can often provide their patrons with a comprehensive database search tool using the resources they already pay for combined with free online tools. Institutions subscribing to EBSCOhost databases can employ EBSCO's simple and no-cost Search Box Builder to create a single search box for searching multiple complementary tools. The authors present a case study of one such combined searching tool and a comparison of results from this tool and one of the preeminent discovery services. The authors argue that health care-focused libraries can find much of the functionality of an expensive discovery service minus the outlay of scarce funds by blending already held and available resources.

Millennial Undergraduate Research Strategies in Web and Library Information Retrieval Systems

This article summarizes the author's dissertation regarding search strategies of millennial undergraduate students in Web and library online information retrieval systems. Millennials bring a unique set of search characteristics and strategies to their research since they have never known a world without the Web. Through the use of search engines, they have come to expect that searches can be completed using an easy, single search box that produces complete articles on just about any topic. However, the reliability and quality of much of the information on the Web is questionable. Conversely, information that resides in library information retrieval systems is often of high scholarly content, but there is not a single, user-friendly system for millennials to use. A case study investigation was conducted at the State University of New York at Oswego, a public undergraduate university in Central New York. The goal of the study was to identify the search strategies of a sampling of millennial undergraduate students in both Web information retrieval systems and library information retrieval systems in order to expand upon existing theories about millennials and to suggest interface design enhancements, which could make online library information retrieval systems easier for millennials to use. The findings recommend improving database search functionality, such as natural-language searching, spell-checking, and uniform full-text wording and placement. Results also suggested that increasing the availability of full-text articles would contribute to millennials’ use of library information retrieval systems.

A Student Perspective on e-Resource Discovery: Has the Google Factor Changed Publisher Platform Searching Forever?

The literature shows that students are more likely to begin their search via Google, as it is perceived to be easier and more accessible than other databases or publisher platforms. The invisible web, specifically publisher platforms, is sometimes too difficult for students to access; there are also suggestions that Google Scholar in particular may outperform other paid-for databases. The ease of access and the somewhat misguided notion that Google Scholar has more reliable information than that provided by libraries makes search engines all the more attractive. This culture of searching using a single search box is reflected in the increase in the number of libraries opting for single resource discovery systems such as Summon or Primo, which use a single search covering all the library holdings. The findings suggest that whilst Google Scholar can perform well in some circumstances, it performed only moderately well when compared with LISTA and Summon – the single resource discovery system tested. It was the least successful resource in terms of precision when compared with LISTA, Summon, Emerald and Sage. However, the simplicity of search engines begs the question: will databases and publisher platforms become obsolete? The study concludes that subject specific databases are more effective than search engines, but the complexity of accessing the invisible web is hindering their popularity.

Key Issue <br>Discovery services: next generation of searching scholarly information

The new breed of resource discovery services is an evolutionary step forward in providing library users with a ‘one-stop shop’ where they can find information sources for their research. They provide a single search box that can search a library’s online and physical content including articles, books, journals, newspaper articles, e-books, specialist collections and more. These discovery services have built on the concepts of both federated searching and next-generation catalogues (described briefly below).