Oh, you’re presenting incremental results?

That’s a whole different UI challenge that I’ve basically given up on. I can’t figure out any way to have incremental results that are not REALLY confusing to users.

Here in Ohio, the intention our project is to merge the unified index data with the federated search data. My gut tells me it will be possible, and I’ve seen evidence in some systems that it can happen. We’ll see if it happens at scale, though.

As we chatted about on the code4lib IRC channel I’m somewhat optimistic that A&I providers may see benefits from putting their data into Summon. This is based on the assumption that they are getting paid for their data, so it represents a new revenue stream for them. (I don’t know if this is actually the case.) Unified indexes like Summon aren’t necessarily a threat to their core users because the heavy duty researchers will likely need the advanced indexing and search capabilities that an aggregator like Summon won’t be able to provide. For OhioLINK’s project, we are operating under the assumption that the unified discovery layer represents a new interface to the data; it doesn’t replace existing interfaces where that advanced functionality will still reside.

So there’s nothing to stop customers from writing a front-end that IS a hybrid solution, using an external broadcast search solution. I mean, you would have trouble merging the results from both, but you could provide the results in seperate listings, which is the only realistic thing to do anyway, I think.

I think it’s reasonable for Summon to limit the scope of their project to not include broadcast search, but provide the hooks for you to easily combine it with broadcast search in your own hybrid solution. The scope of Summon is big enough already!

I’m actually not sure whether to be optimstic about _publishers_ sharing metadata with Summon. I would be pessimistic about an A&I db or aggregator sharing metadata with Summon, becuase summon will be seen as a competitor. But if Summon isn’t actually providing access to human-readable fulltext (as they are not) — do most publishers make much money off search of their content alone? Maybe the biggest ones like Elsevier, which are also aggregators. But for a publisher who isn’t also an aggregator, I’m somewhat optimistic that they’d see it as in their interests to share rather than withhold metadata. Having the technical infrastructure to easily and regularly deliver the metadata is another story though.

(And, by the way, I consider plain text full text used for matching queries but NOT used to actually deliver a human-readable version — to be ‘metadata’. )