Slide 1

Digital Library Federation Forum, April 12, 2006

Unbundling the ILS: Deploying an e-commerce catalog search solution

Integrating Endeca

nEndeca doesn’t understand MARC data / MARC-8 character encoding – translate to UTF-8 text files

nEach night a script updates the data indexed by Endeca:

–Exports updated or new MARC records from Unicorn.

–Reformats and merges these records with those already indexed.

–Starts Endeca re-index – completely rebuilding index for the catalog.

nProcess requires about 7 hours.

nRetain Web2 OPAC for some functionality

–Authority searching - known items and cross-references

–Detailed record pages – how to make Endeca -> Web2 link?


	Already mentioned integration a bit, but we just wanted to emphasize some of the many things we had to work out in order to integrate a piece of non-library software with our ILS.
	Nightly translate records stored in MARC21 format with MARC-8 character encoding to records stored in flat text files with UTF-8 character encoding.
	Since we’re exporting records from ILS, we also have to keep Endeca records in sync with ILS data.
	As Andrew reminded us, OPACS are good at known-item searching. We chose to integrate the Endeca keyword searching capabilities with Web2 authority searching (which meant figuring out how to present both types of searches on the search page), in part b/c we didn’t know yet how well Endeca would handle known-item searching (turns out it’s not too bad) and b/c we haven’t yet found a good solution for bringing authority linkages into Endeca. We also decided to retain the Web2 detailed record pages, rather than building detailed record pages in Endeca, b/c they have lots of their own functionality that has been built into the OPAC over time. For instance, there is the capability to browse the shelf around this item and request checked out materials. The lack of a good, reliable, unique identifier in our MARC records made this linkage between Endeca and Web2 quite a challenge, which we finally solved by placing our database keys for each record into the MARC 918 field.