No matter how long it takes, no matter how far,

Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Wed, 2007-07-25 18:02

reference

Back when we switched the name of this service from Answerland to L-net, I Googled for L-net and my favorite result was www.dd-l.net, a tribute to Daniel Day-Lewis.

Honestly, I can't think of Daniel Day-Lewis without cracking up over his emphatic line in Last of the Mohicans, "I will find you!"

In his honor, no really, in yours, I've added a new page to our site, www.oregonlibraries.net/find, a search engine of about 1,700 sites that librarians on our service have shared with patrons in more than five separate sessions.

I know that sending pages to patrons isn't the same thing as collection development, but I like what I see in my test searches: no ads, no news links, just good wholesome sites. I hope.

So far it isn't linked anywhere but here. Where should it go?

The front page?

The about page that loads when patrons connect to us?

The homework help page?

In the site banner?

Find is based on Google Coop Custom Search Engine and it lets you add new sites in bulk, but it isn't letting me add thousands and thousands at a time, which is what I want to do because Emily suggested we change the search to include sites we've sent more than once (about 6,200).

We can add the L-net Find search engine other places also, like library websites, school websites, and I even popped it into the L-net policy page for the 24/7 cooperative and I'm going to see what happens.

Luke Rosenberger gave me this idea, probably a year ago, and Dave Lankes once did a similar thing with Reference Extract.

Comments

I think the ultimate goal is

Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Thu, 2007-07-26 16:05.

I think the ultimate goal is to be able to serve more people with the same number of staff.

I don't think that using a search engine is the same as working with a librarian, but we can't forget that the web is primarily a self-serve medium.

I added the option to search either sites we've sent more than once (6,000+ of 18,000+ total) or individual pages we've sent more than once (10,000+ of 60,000+ total). I'm going to ask for feedback to see which works better.

Nice!

Submitted by on Thu, 2007-07-26 15:42.

I just tried a (very) few searches from some questions I remember answering via LNet and the results were impressive. Way to harness the power of the collective! This makes a lot more sense to me than something like Mahalo (not to knock Mahalo, but this just seems more sustainable and responsive.)

I figured out that Google

Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Wed, 2007-07-25 18:24.

I figured out that Google limits us to 5,000 sites to index. There's a way to have more if we host the links locally. That would get around my need to update it pretty well, also.

We'll see how this one goes.