"Matthew J. Dovey" wrote:

> On a related matter, one of the other concerns from the metasearch crew
> is about branding. One of the things I focused on in a report I did for
> the JISC on service descriptions is the wealth of bradning type
> information in traditional Explain. For instance:
>
> An icon used to represent this database (in machine presentable form)
> (today this would probably be termed a logo rather than icon)....

Can someone provide insight into the branding issue as it pertains to
metasearching (and srw, Z39.50, explain, zeerex, etc.)?  If it's just a
matter of getting the information elements defined in appropriate schemas,
that doesn't seem a significant problem.

I have the impression, though,  that the problem is,  metasearching implies
de-duping. So if you search 20 systems and they all have the same record
(according to whatever deduping algorithm is used) you end up with a single
record (not 20) in the consolodated result set, and the record loses its
identity as belonging to any one of the systems.  Is that not the problem?

--Ray