Primo Central webinar 9th Feb 2010

Quick recap - Primo Central is an index of scholarly material, hosted and managed by Ex Libris which will be free to Metalib customers. It will be released in the Metalib Knowledgebase in Q3 2010 and will contain articles, ebooks and some other e-content and will index the bib data, abstracts and full text.

The webinar showed that there's a large list of publishers signed up - some such as EBSCO will only be available to subscribers (although it wasn't clear exactly how this will be configured).The info should be up to date - the index will be updated daily for most resources but more often where necessary. Some thing which I hadn't realised is that you will be able to see where each result has come from so can link to that database to do a more in depth search.

The main advantage is that search response will be much faster - rather than having to wait for individual databases to send results it will all be comign from one place.

SFX/ Metalib Day School - 20 Oct 09

As with last year's day school this was a really interesting and useful day, especially being able to speak to people who actually work on the systems and see what other institutions are doing.

Metasearch through Xerxes (Graham Seaman - RHU)

RHU have implemented Xerxes on top of Metalib to provide a improved user interface following negative feedback from the NSS. Set up had been fairly straightforward - at RHU it was done over one summer and knowledge of PHP and XSLT was needed. No formal feedback from users as yet but informal feedback suggests users like the new interface (and although not promoted the old Metalib interface can still be accessed). I think it's a definite improvement on the current Metalib interface but as someone in the audience pointed out - why are we having to user Xerxes to do this, why don't Ex Libris improve the Metalib interface? You can see the RHU implementation at http://xerxes.rhul.ac.uk/