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What should be part of SUNY-wide library initiatives going forward? Are there new search and discovery tools that would benefit SUNY library resource utilization? Some of our students start research tasks in Google, but what can we do so they end up using vetted library resources to complete the research?

These are some of the questions the Futures Group (the Shared Search & Discovery Services Committee, SSDSC) has been working on.

Initial evaluation has been via a significant number of online presentations/demos. Included in these have been
tools bringing new features to the catalog, those that are designed for federating searches of multiple databases, catalogs, etc. and those that do a combination of both.

The products include commercial software as well as open source software. Many have features such as faceted browsing; spell-checking/"Did you mean?"; various ways of sorting results including relevancy ranking; web 2.0 components; visual/graphic-based searching; sophisticated options for citing, emailing, tagging
and/or syndicating search results. Likewise, many of these products allow for the direct searching of other
collections in addition to the library catalog and/or running a single search against multiple databases/files.

The group has done investigation of 360Search, AquaBrowser, Encore, Endeca, the eXtensible Catalog Project, Grokker, LibraryFind, Primo, eContent Searcher & Analyzer, VUFind, WebFeat, and Worldcat Local.

SSDSC is looking to make recommendations to S.A.C. by the end of the first quarter.