If I haven’t said before, we’re pretty much e-mad at the University of New Mexico. Not only are we implementing a suite of Serials Solutions products, but we’re also talking about WorldCat Local as a faceted OPAC option.

We had a meeting to discuss this (kind of planning for the planning). The words faceted and federated were flying around with reckless abandon! I think some folks are kind of assuming these two ideas (faceted user interface and federated searching) are part of one and the same ideal: better user interface. In a perfect world they are. We could offer a single interface to access a variety (or all) of our resources and the results from such a search interface would be easy to navigate and drill into.

Alas. Such is not really the case in the faceted and federated market today. Nothing currently available will really meet the needs of those two demands…in one product. We can offer a search that covers many of our information resources and we can offer a better user interface for our OPAC. Right now, we can’t do both in one place. I am of the opinion that we go ahead with separate products to meet the two needs (Serials Solutions federated search and WorldCat Local) and ask Santa to bring us something later that will do both.