About this site
What is Vera Multi-Search?
Vera Multi-Search is a tool to help you quickly find journal articles and other materials from several different library research databases all at once.
It uses what's known as a "federated search" to search databases from several different publishers' sites at once (our subscription e-journals and databases). It then merges the results and presents them to you in the Vera Multi-Search interface. When you click on a title, you are linked back to the publisher's site that contains the full text of that article.
See our FAQ for more specific information.
Possible future enhancements
Some possible future enhancements include:
- inclusion of a "did you mean" spellchecker to help refine your query (similar to Google)
- highlighting of your search terms in the results.
Other items will be added based on user feedback and usability test results.
Limitations and known bugs
There are some limitations in our ability to make changes, due to our dependence on fixes by the vendors of the underlying products (see Technical notes below).
- We can't send your query to the native interface of each database when clicking on links in the sidebar of our results screen - (links called "visit site"). Instead we can only link you to the database's search screen, where you'll need to enter your query again.
- It's not currently possible to sort results after you have filtered by a particular database. It is, however, possible to sort the merged set of results from all the databases you searched.
- It's not possible to link all the way to the exact article for every title. Sometimes we can only link to the search screen for an e-journal, if the vendor of that site hasn't provided a way to link all the way to the article level.
See also our list of known issues.
Technical notes
Vera Multi-Search uses a number of different technologies working together.
1. Metalib is a product that we've purchased from ExLibris (the same vendor that provides ALEPH, which is behind MIT Libraries' Barton catalog). Metalib makes it possible to conduct simultaneous searches in databases from vendors that publish our subscription databases and e-journals. It's a database that stores and provides connection information for each database, using either Z39.50 or custom XML connection files to do the work.
2. Metalib's X-server is the product that allows us to create our own custom interface to Metalib. The X-server makes available XML data from each database that we can use in our own custom application to display citation details and links to full text.
3. Our custom application is created with Java Servlets and XSLT. It takes data being returned from our licensed databases via Metalib's X-server (see above) and powers the pages you see when you do a "multi-search" query.
4. SFX: This is another product from ExLibris, known as an openURL link resolver. This technology allows us to make the links to full text for each citation, no matter which publisher's e-journal contains the full text. For example, Web of Knowledge is one of our subscription databases for library research. It contains citations to thousands of e-journals from many different publishers. These citations are to a wide variety of e-journals, both those we subscribe to and those we don't.
The SFX database stores information about all the e-journals we subscribe to (currently over 36,000 titles). SFX uses this database to create a link from a citation in a database such as Web of Knowledge, to the full text of the article in another product (such as Journal of Cell Biology from Highwire Press). If we don't subscribe to a particular publication, SFX will display a menu with links for other delivery options, such as borrowing from other libraries (ILLiad), or links to our Barton catalog so you can find a print version of the journal.
SFX is the technology behind the A-Z list of our ejournals that you can search from the Vera Multi-Search home page, or at http://libraries.mit.edu/ejournals.
Development team
The idea for Vera Multi-Search came out of many previous usability tests and the User Needs Study (Photo Diary Study) conducted by the MIT Libraries staff in 2006. The Metalib Task Force of the MIT Libraries did initial brainstorming and planning for this project in 2006 and early 2007.
Project manager and user interface designer
Nicole Hennig
Multi-search application developer
Sands Fish
Programmer for SFX customization
Rich Wenger
SFX Knowledgebase Maintainer
Jennifer Edwards
Metalib Knowledgebase Maintainer
Selina Wang
Metalib Task Force
Michelle Baildon, Maggie Bartley, Darcy Duke, Sands Fish, Nicole Hennig, Rich Wenger
User Interface Group
Maggie Bartley, Darcy Duke, Nicole Hennig, Lisa Horowitz, Sylvia Mejia (beginning Fall 2007). Former members: Bonnie Parks and Lisa Harrington (through August 2007).
