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Integrating digital libraries and VLEs in higher & further education

Cross-searching

Enabling cross-searching across the various resources that may be tied together throught the VLE and digital library is problematic. There are a number of issues:

• The shallow nature of much cross-searching, and the related problem that access to native interfaces may be needed for deep searching of a particular resource.
• Differential response times from different resources. This means that results cannot be presented reliably until the slowest target has completed, especially if the intention is to concatenate and process result sets.
• The ranking of result sets is problematic even when the full set is available since the end-user may not define ranking criteria in the same way as developers or targets.
• Removal of duplicates is non-trivial.
• Problems of semantic interoperability, even where common schema are being used and interpreted in the same way. There is considerable scope for confusion where there is no common agreement or approach to vocabulary control.
• While there is considerable experience of cross-searching, cross-browsing is less well understood.

Additional Resources

Forthcoming..... contributions gratefully received