FOR THOSE FEW BUT DEDICATED READERS: My apologies for not posting here sooner. Though I've had little to show for it in this space, I haven't been idle.
Props to Garrett Hungerford of Library Zen for introducing me to Google Co-Op, one of those many Google spin-offs (or outright purchase? Dunno, my back was turned), now with Create Your Own Search Engine. (Sounds like laundry product ads from my childhood.) Garrett's adaptation to compile a search engine for LIS bogs, LISZEN, is a masterful case of killer app -- the very sort of thing that at its best sets one to thinking.
One of my less whiz-bang responsibilities at work (until now) has been selecting titles for the library. We have few vendors who can match our narrow and specialized scope and broad spectrum of publishing venues with their approval plans. That puts a premium on finding titles on your own in order to guarantee the fullest coverage. Over time I have compiled a monster bookmark with the url's of all the publishers, trade and academic, putting out titles in our subject areas. A great start, but a pretty dull to plow through. Each publisher insists on designing its web site differently, providing for different search strategies (if any), arrangement and groupings of products, file formats (including the ever frustrating pdf), and page displays. (I feel that by now I could give an excellent presentation on how not to design a publisher's web site.)
Along comes Google Co-Op, and 'twas then the penny dropped. If I gathered all the root url's from the publishers' web sites, I could search across all their pages for keywords as I would any Google search. It's no substitute for hunting down the new titles one by one, but it could certainly cover most of the pages I'd need on a regular basis.
The mechanics of working in GC-O were surprisingly easy (with a few blunders along the way). I was even able to strip out the annoying advertising by attesting to being a 501(c)(3) institution. A few more deft taps and I could drop my test search engine into this blog. (That's it under SEARCH ENGINES at the bottom of the left column.) For now I've only managed an engine for the academic presses; I may still do one for trade publishers (if I sense a need for different keyword strategies) or fold it into the existing one.
It is worth pointing out that GC-O defaults to root url's (i.e., www.site.com). Web sites with subsites (subsite.site.com) need to be individually specified. At this early stage I haven't yet taken advantage of Google Marker, a handy way to gather url's to populate your search engines.
This particular application will probably spend most of its time behind the scenes. What's cool is that this also comes at the very moment that we are dismantling our Intranet pages and fashioning wiki pages for the same information. My colleague is working to transfer a key reference page featuring the web addresses for art and ethnography museums worldwide. The logical next step is a publicly-available search engine crossing all these museum web sites. That should find its way into the Goldwater Blog -- stay tuned.
Lest you think I spent all my time with my nose to the grindstone, I also took time out for Hallowe'en (left) and to visit a cemetery, but that's the stuff of another post on another blog.
