Decision Notes

Citations

a Citation Collection is a Java object that holds Citation Java objects.
- these objects are the technical backing behind a Citation List
a Citation List is a human-viewable document that displays Citations and Citation services.

does the Citation List live in a document, or in a single place?
for fall, Citation Lists will be attached as copy
decision needs to be made - do we want to attach links instead of copies (this requires advancement of the Attachment helper in Sakai)

for the fall - Citations will be attachments to other documents and not be embedded.
the user should be able to embed a listing of Citations into a document such as a Syllabus, Assignment, etc.

For Fall
- have pre-defined search sets within metasearch engines (MetaLib and SingleSearch)
  - pilot course search sets
    - faculty/librarian would need to define search sets with pilot administrators (us) and pilot admins would configure Sakai accordingly.
  - "all databases" search sets
  - subject search sets (i.e. art, history, engineering, etc.)
- once a search set is chosen from a drop-down, a list of databases with checkable boxes is presented.
  - user has the ability to pick and choose up to a set number of databases to search concurrently.

search targets are selected
search query is entered
search is called against ROI method, getAssetsBySearch()
decision needs to be made - getAssetsBySearch() needs a defined query syntax
- we can either tailor this syntax to every target that we search, or use a standard, such as CQL
getAssetsBySearch() builds the query, and using configuration settings, initiates the marshalling of the query to be sent to the selected target
- Steve has got this marshalling done for Sirsi and a number of other targets
  - this code is primarily an HTTP connection management/transport setup
after marshalling, query is sent to the metasearch engine
metasearch engine does its work
- decision needs to be made - MetaLib can support asynchronous searches (we can get records back before the entire search is done), but we're not sure if Sirsi can.
metasearch engine returns results
the ROI un-marshalls the results and packages them into Assets, Records, Parts
- decision needs to be made - what will be our Assets, RecordStructures, PartStructures?
Assets will be used to populate Jim's Citations
decision needs to be made - will the entire result set be a CitationCollection?
decision needs to be made - will the Assets be used to present results or the Citations?

decision needs to be made - what sorting options can we provide?
- number of results (i.e. 10, 20, 30, etc.)
- by database (i.e. top 20 from ProQuest)
- title
- author
  - first name/last name problem...
we will probably have to decide this once we start getting some results, displaying them and seeing our options with the two different metasearch engines
Jim is looking for a basic HTML wireframe of what the results will look like
- attach Jim's whiteboard image...
Research/Investigation
- What can we do with the search technology?
  - what do results look like (i.e. year, author, etc.)
  - can Sirsi Web2 Bridge do asynchronous searches?
  - can we sort results by database?
- What can we do with display technology?
  - can we dynamically update numbers on the page