1 February 2010 - 12:00
The development of new search technologies, and new search behaviours, has opened up new opportunities for libraries to expose their holdings. Our users are more used to searching large aggregations of items, and to being able to obtain rare and unusual items relatively easily. Library holdings, if exposed through centrally searchable union catalogues like Libraries Australia, could see a significant increase in usage in the new "long tail" environment. To take advantage of these opportunities, however, libraries need to provide tools to make resource discovery easier across large stores of records - including relevance ranking and clustering of search results. During 2006, the National Library has taken steps forward in harnessing these technologies for Libraries Australia. An explanation of the development of a set of rules for the relevance ranking of bibliographic records is given, and the work done to advance clustering of relevance ranking and other potential search technologies is explored.