Lorcan Dempsey often puts into words thoughts I can't articulate (because I am so poor at that) about providing better access/service to information resources for our primary users. I've been stewing for months about a better way to accomodate the gotta-get-it-quick-or-not-at-all approach that many of our users employ -- not just the students. I don't have the programming skills, nor do I really feel like we should necessarily provide some form of metasearch as a primary means for obtaining information for student assignments. I'm as torn as the next person about our responsibility to teach "proper" research techniques. There are lots of articles in our literature about this. I guess I feel that we should offer some form of the ggiqonal approach so we don't lose them immediately, but... I'm not sure how to best do that.
Some thoughts expressed by Lorcan Dempsey in a larger article worth reading:
( http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000768.html )
Metasearch is not an end in itself, although we sometimes talk about it as if it were. The aim is to provide search services at the level of database combination that makes sense for the user, to provide guidance on those combinations, and to present the services in ways which make sense in user environments. This last point is important; one may want to present a metasearch service as a web page, as a box in a reading list or course page, as a machine interface which other applications talk to, and so on. Metasearch, like all other library services, will be part of an eco-system of services. One can talk of its place in the discover-locate-request-deliver chain, and we have seen much work of late providing integration with resolution and fulfilment services of various kinds, so that the user can move from discovery to fulfilment in a more streamlined way. Increasingly, we may want data to flow more easily (to work with reference/citation managers), or to mix metasearch capacity into particular environments (a course apparatus is an example).
