[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Seeking funding partners for Evergreen search project

[Kathy Lussier]

Hi all,

As you know, MassLNC has been working this year on finding ways to 
improve search in Evergreen. As a result of several community-wide 
discussions on search as well as a follow-up meeting with our colleagues 
at Equinox, we are now looking to fund some projects that we believe 
will bring improvements to the current Evergreen search.

The projects include:

- investigatory work for infrastructure improvements for search. This is 
largely a consulting project where Equinox would prototype the 
elimination of staged search, analyze potential optimizations in newer 
PostgreSQL releases, and investigate and prototype other relevance 
improvements.

- a development project to implement the improvements that come out of 
the investigatory phase of the project.

- a search and display infrastructure project. This project will change 
the way we configure indexes for the keyword class, allowing us to 'kill 
the blob' that is currently used as the default keyword index. It will 
also implement the Metabib Display Fields development. Expected end 
results of this project are to 1) Allow sites to more easily weight 
fields in a keyword search 2) Use Metabib Display Fields to render the 
catalog's search results and record detail pages 3) Add the ability to 
use proper case in reports, 4) Add the ability to highlight search terms 
in the search results page and the record details page.

We also hope that this work will lay the groundwork for building a good 
Did You Mean? enhancement in the future, even though it isn't included 
in the scope of the current project.

MassLNC is committed to allocating funds towards this work, but the 
project is complicated, and we are not able to fund it on our own. We 
are putting out a call to see if there are other Evergreen sites out 
there that are interested in helping us fund this very important project.

If you would like more information on this project, please send me a 
direct e-mail, and I will share more details with you.

Thank you!
Kathy

-- 
Kathy Lussier
Project Coordinator
Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative
(508) 343-0128
klussier at masslnc.org
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier