[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen access via Google?

[Rogan Hamby]

I can't remember the year off hand but Dan did a presentation on schema.org
(and related stuff <-- highly technical term) at one of the Evergreen
conferences.  Vancouver I think?  There might be video somewhere.



On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 8:52 AM, Ben Shum <bshum at biblio.org> wrote:

> Hi Don,
>
> Starting as recently as Evergreen 2.6 (it's noted on the Evergreen 2.6
> release notes under "structured data" -
> http://evergreen-ils.org/documentation/release/RELEASE_NOTES_2_6.html),
> efforts were made by developers like Dan Scott to add structured data
> elements to Evergreen's catalog to make them more discoverable.  This
> work has continued throughout newer Evergreen releases and I'd like to
> say that through Dan's work and others, it has been essential towards
> keeping Evergreen's catalog more friendly to search engines, like
> Google, etc.
>
> Evergreen 2.8's release notes include lots more discoverability
> enhancements added with that release too:
> http://evergreen-ils.org/documentation/release/RELEASE_NOTES_2_8.html#_opac
>
> Since your site does not include a manually configured robots.txt
> file, I'll point you at an example set at Dan's library Laurentian
> University's catalog:  https://laurentian.concat.ca/robots.txt  (we
> based many of our changes following the example they set).
>
> That robots.txt file tends to guide search engine bots that arrive at
> the catalog towards indexing the appropriate contents, and avoid/skip
> over certain undesirables.
>
> By default, if you do not have anything set, then search engine bots
> will likely attempt to index everything in your catalog that it can
> publicly access.
>
> Doing an example search like
> https://www.google.com/#q=asbury+catalog+Star+Trek (aka, keywords in
> Google for "asbury catalog Star Trek" I can already see a couple
> results that come from your Evergreen catalog records.  So at least
> Google's search engine bots are already working to grab your catalog's
> contents.
>
> That all said, I suppose one potential "danger" of having bots freely
> scan over your site is that if they get too busy with indexing your
> site's contents, they can overwhelm and cause interruptions in your
> ability to use Evergreen.  This happened to us at least once before,
> where some indexer in China scanned our whole catalog and tried to
> index every page causing us to run out of system resources trying to
> serve up all the content it was requesting.
>
> For myself and Bibliomation's catalog, I've been experimenting with
> modifying our robots.txt file and continually upgrading our Evergreen
> catalog to reflect the latest enhancements for structured data to try
> making the most use out of what's possible in Evergreen.  Proceeding
> forward, I've also done some small experiments in creating Google
> Custom Search Engines to search against our indexed online catalog
> (and requesting scheduled indexing from Google's bots) as an
> alternative means of discovering the content contained in our systems.
>
> Moving forward, I expect this to continue to be an exciting area to
> explore the ways of improving discoverability of Evergreen's content.
>
> -- Ben
>
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 8:15 AM, Donald Butterworth
> <don.butterworth at asburyseminary.edu> wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I was asked to toss these questions out and get some perspectives.
> >
> > "What would it take to make the Evergreen catalog holdings available to
> > generic search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo?" "Even
> if it
> > is doable, is it a good idea?"
> >
> > The motivation behind these questions is a perception that the first
> attempt
> > many students make to do research is through a general web search.
> >
> > Anybody have a comment?
> >
> > Don
> >
> > --
> > Don Butterworth
> > Faculty Associate / Librarian III
> > B.L. Fisher Library
> > Asbury Theological Seminary
> > don.butterworth at asburyseminary.edu
> > (859) 858-2227
>
>
>
> --
> Benjamin Shum
> Evergreen Systems Manager
> Bibliomation, Inc.
> 24 Wooster Ave.
> Waterbury, CT 06708
> 203-577-4070, ext. 113
>



-- 

Rogan Hamby, MLS, CCNP, MIA
Managers Headquarters Library and Reference Services,
York County Library System

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit
me.”
― C.S. Lewis <http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1069006.C_S_Lewis>
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