Probably by now many, if not all, of my readers have heard about the Extensible Catalog (XC) Project managed by the University of Rochester. Heretofore it has mainly been known for producing metadata tools useful for extracting and processing data from a library catalog.
But today they have announced a user interface component to their toolkit that brings full-featured search and navigation capabilities to XC. Based on the Drupal content management system, it offers such features as faceted browsing, display of search words in context, relevancy ranking, and more.
According to the announcement, the system includes the ability to retrieve live circulation status from an integrated library system, although it isn’t immediately clear if it is able to interact with systems other than Voyager (Rochester’s ILS). Such communication likely uses their NCIP implementation, but vendors can vary dramatically on their support of this rambling standard.
At first glance, this looks like yet another credible entry into the growing array of “next-gen” user interfaces to our catalog systems such as VUFind and Blacklight. However, it remains qualitatively different than systems that integrate not just catalog and repository content but also journal article databases, such as Summon and WorldCat Local.
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