Tools for creating your own resource portal: CWIS and the Scout Portal Toolkit

Library Trends, Spring, 2005 by Edward Almasy

Keyword Searching

Because searching is often faster and more effective than browsing (provided the user has concrete insight on at least some aspects of the desired items), many people prefer to search rather than browse to locate data on the Web. CWIS provides two separate search mechanisms, both based on Scout's OSMASE search engine.

Keyword searching, the method familiar to most Web users, is very similar to the approach presented by Google[TM] and other general Web search engines. Users enter terms that are related or may appear in the entries that they are looking for, and those terms are used to determine which resources best fit the search. CWIS supports most of the conventions offered by sites like Google, such as phrase searching (enclosing several words in quotation marks to indicate that the user is looking for the words in that specific sequence) and term exclusion (prepending a minus sign to a word to indicate that the user only wants results that do not include that term). Keyword search results in CWIS are ordered by their relevance to the terms entered. How various metadata fields are weighted to determine this relevance (for example, terms appearing in Title are more significant than those appearing in Description), as well as which fields are considered for keyword searching, can be adjusted via the Metadata Field Editor, allowing portal administrators to tweak search performance to best fit their portal content and audience.

Fielded Searching

To better take advantage of the precision offered by the metadata assigned to resources, CWIS also supports fielded searching. With a fielded search, users enter terms in a fashion similar to a keyword search, but along with those terms users can specify the fields in which to look for the terms. For nontextual fields, fielded searching also allows users to specify constraints that can be used to narrow the search results. For example, when searching through a collection of digitized rare books stored online, a user might be able to specify only nonfiction books that were published between 1885 and 1890.

Because of the potential complexity of a fielded search, CWIS provides the ability for each user to save a set of search parameters and recall them at a later date to run the search again.

User Agents

Combining this ability to save fielded searches with what has become known in Internet jargon as "push technology," CWIS also offers a feature sometimes referred to as "user agents." This capability allows users to set up and save a fielded search that returns items they may find of interest and then have that fielded search automatically performed nightly or weekly by the portal, with any new results found being assembled into a report that is sent to the user via email. These reports can be invaluable to users by keeping them abreast in a timely fashion of new resources that may become available, and they benefit the portal developer by actively maintaining awareness of the portal among the user community.