Equality of Retrieval: Leveling the Metadata Playing Field in Big Indexes

Abstract

The University of Calgary's Libraries and Cultural Resources became a beta partner with Serials Solutions’ unified discovery service, Summon, in the spring of 2009. Since then it has worked to include metadata from numerous disparate systems in a single index to drive discovery in a Google-like environment. The University has examined how MARC and other metadata schemas are mapped into Summon with an eye to ensuring the maximum possible population of index fields representing facets in addition to adhering to the established standards for cross mapping metadata schemas and indexing. It has investigated existing standards and worked closely with the Summon team to create mappings that reflect how MARC and other metadata can ultimately be used in big indexes. Combined with the normalization or collapsing of metadata records representing the same resource into a single metadata-rich record, fully leveraging MARC and other metadata in big indexes should not only level the metadata playing field but make competition between records a non-issue.