Dear Colleagues, I recently sent this message to ByWater Solutions partner institutions, but I would like to expand my call and solicit your support for integrating ElasticSearch <http://www.elasticsearch.org/> into Koha. The goal is to add a new search engine next to the current Zebra search engine. This is a fundamental, strategic development that will ensure that Koha remains relevant in the coming years and that will benefit the entire Koha community. The current Zebra search engine works fine, but it is of a previous generation and has important limitations. In particular, it doesn't allow us to take full advantage of linked data. Koha currently links to Google Books and Scholar, Amazon, the Open Library, and WorlCat. This is wonderful, but automatic links to Google Books and Amazon are limited to recent publications with ISBN (in use only since the 1970s) and access to Google Scholar, the Open Library and WorldCat is limited to a title keyword search. With the proposed dependencies for implementing ElasticSearch <http://www.elasticsearch.org/>, we will expand these options and facilitate linking to most any repository by providing a MARC to RDF crosswalk and greater flexibility to ingest other metadata schemes. Providing libraries with the option to select ElasticSearch <http://www.elasticsearch.org/> as their preferred search engine instead of Zebra (it is important to stress that this would be a choice), would open the door to linking to the full content of Google Books and the Hathi Trust, the Digital Public Library and other repositories, or to controlled vocabularies, such as the Library of Congress Authorities <http://id.loc.gov/> or VIAF <http://viaf.org/>. Linking could be established on a number of criteria, including keywords, but also OCLC numbers and LCCN. In short, implementing Koha with ElasticSearch <http://www.elasticsearch.org/> would open the world of linked data and permit Koha to function in a manner more similar to current discovery tools. Today, to benefit from the flexibility that discovery tools provide, you would have to implement one in addition to Koha. That means contracting with another company or developing your own. Few of us will be able to afford that. With ElasticSearch <http://www.elasticsearch.org/>, the Koha community would be able to gradually develop Koha to fulfill the same purpose, with the added benefit that the current development of ElasticSearch <http://www.elasticsearch.org/> in Koha provides the option to browse the collection. In this manner, users would be able to perform powerful and fast keyword searches, as well as browse the collection by author, title, subject or call number, and link out to repositories for access to the full text or to controlled vocabularies. Currently we cannot browse the catalog in useful methods with Zebra. An additional benefit is that ElasticSearch <http://www.elasticsearch.org/> will improve speed, as you can cluster the search engine and actually control and configure the configuration files to use more system resources. The initial data is cross-walked from MARC to JSON, which is a lightweight metadata schema and which will greatly improve speed. Finally, ElasticSearch <http://www.elasticsearch.org/> is open source and, just like Koha, benefits from a dynamic community supporting its continued growth. To keep Koha relevant and to expand its functionality mattersto all of us and I would like to ask you to contribute to this development by contacting brendan@bywatersolutions.com or kathryn@catalyst.net.nz -- please also feel free to contact me. Best regards from Rome, Sebastian Hierl *Koha Gruppo Italiano <https://it-it.facebook.com/KohaGruppoItaliano>* -- Sebastian Hierl, Ph.D. Drue Heinz Librarian, Arthur & Janet C. Ross Library American Academy in Rome Via Angelo Masina 5 00153 Rome Italy T: +39 06 5846 417 F: +39 06 5810 788