Usage Scenarios

Unified and remote access to resources for information retrieval – staff gets access to and uses subscribed content in a uniform and organized manner

Target: Academic environments (Universities, Research institutes and University Libraries either directly or through consortia), Public Libraries, Hospital and Medical Institution, Government Institutions, Corporations

Problem: Organizations subscribe to content providers for their electronic resources in their specific domain: Scientific, Medical, Arts, Humanities, Law, Business, name it. Subscriptions are expensive and the institution must take advantage of this content for its staff and be sure the usage is maximized. But this is very delicate because staff need to know the data sources URLs and have the organization credential to log into those systems. Updates to this list or credentials needs to be propagated to all the staff. In case of IP authentication they need to be physically present or use VPN if allowed. This is very difficult for remote access implied by mobility which is today’s de facto requirement.

The most important of the operations done for the content providers are searches and navigation to full text. Each content provider has its own interface and people needs to get accustomed to tens or hundreds of different interfaces. Hence not only each system needs to be separately accessed using different credentials and locations but also each system has disparate look and feel. A significant time is spent by users in accessing and correctly running queries against the sources, comparing results side by side in order to discover the right content.

Solution: Muse® integrates all the resources into a single point of unified access for search and circulation operations. Query, protocols, result presentation, results manipulation, additional operations such as enrichment and circulation are all similar for all the sources. Local catalogs and other internal searchable databases and repositories can be included as well in the Federated solution.

Why not access a Muse® Application and transparently bridge the differences between content providers that are contracted by your institution/consortia? Why get used with tens of interfaces, account credentials, query languages instead of a unified interface that adapts to advanced querying features of each provider? Why get familiarized with each provider’s results formatting instead of a singular interface that display all the information in a uniformed way for all of them? Why not having a localized interface in your language? Users don’t even need to check for duplicate results over the providers, as Muse® Application does this for them and there are a lot other helping tools.

Advantages:

  • The resources are maintained in a single place introducing full controllability;
  • There is no need to communicate access details for tens or hundreds of resources and these are isolated;
  • There is no need to spend time learning each individual interface and searching rules;
  • Capabilities of underlying resources can be augmented with various post-processing operations such as deduplication, enrichment from additional sources, content mining (term cloud), export results to other management systems;
  • Localized interface according to the organization language;
  • Different mobile device interfaces, setting up alerts;
  • Unified statistics reports;
  • Access can be done even from off-campus;
  • Support for thousands of data sources;
  • Supporting many Login modules;
  • Polymorphic integration is possible.

Simplified Remote Information Retrieval for Subscribed Resources on Mobile Devices

Target: Academic environments (Universities, Research institutes and University Libraries either directly or through consortia), Public Libraries, Hospital and Medical Institution, Government Institutions, Corporations

Problem: Performing information retrieval on disparate resource providers on mobile devices is a real issue. Consider the myriad of resource URLs, credentials, IP restrictions the user will have to identify and set on its mobile device just to perform simple information retrieval and reading while on the road. Besides it may be possible that some providers are not offering a simpler mobile interface. This is just not fair if we are talking even about a single catalog from the college library or a public library, but what about considering tens or hundred of resources?

Solution: Group the desired content providers, and/or the local catalog under a simple and basic mobile interface ensuring a single point of access, uniform searching and navigation to full text.

Advantages:

  • Let your members use their mobile devices not only to query Google, but also the important resources your organization subscribes to;
  • Get the full-texts directly on the mobile devices/readers;
  • There is no need to manage access details for tens or hundreds of resources with hundreds of users;
  • There is no need to spend time learning each individual interface and searching rules or experiencing non-mobile interfaces for simple searching tasks;
  • Access to the library related Holds and Patron information;
  • Cover enrichment;
  • Interface Language localization.

Classic Public Library

Target: Public Libraries

Problem: An important step for a library patron is to search the local collections, as well as content the library subscribes to. As the philosophy changes from libraries owning the materials to having access via subscriptions combining the local catalog with the subscribed content to discover the right information in a timely manner is crucial. It is also possible that libraries have collections indexed in various systems that they acquired over time, thus users must access different server to find what they are looking for. There are also cases where the library catalog is not accessible via web, but via other specialized protocols.

Solution: Muse® Application unifies all these library databases, no matter they are from a single library or from tens of them. Users will have, by means of a single account and interface, the possibility to search and find what they are looking for very easily, just by selecting the resources they are interested in.

Moreover, Muse® applications provide capabilities to authenticate patrons, retrieve patron information in real-time. My Account functionality is as well supported, including holds, charged fines, overdue, recall items, account messages. Display current availability status, placing hold and enrichment on demand is possible. User actions such as placing holds and renewing items are reflected immediately in the ILS.

Both desktop and mobile device versions are available.

Let visitors, subscribers of your service explore external resources

Target: Sites, Services Owners

With nRich capabilities, the content owner can allow a user to explore a wider array of information sources, without ever leaving the owner’s space on the web. When deployed to a website, the nRich service is invoked whenever a user highlights in text. Instantly the floating nRich window appears, allowing users to select or de-select the types of sources that would like to have included in their search. This is a pioneer like extension with unlimited integration possibilities, all these while benefiting the power of Muse® Application.

Any academic institution, library or content site owner could enhance their existing web sites, web based platforms with this contextual nRich/search feature. Thus, the users will have access on the spot to hundreds of content providers speaking about the same item they are looking at.

eLearning extensions

Target: Schools, Colleges and Universities

eLearning is widely regarded as mainstream nowadays. It is a service offered by most colleges and universities and the core of many business plans. Integration of Federated Search within eLearning solutions, such as Blackboard, brings large benefits as the users must no longer manage subscriptions independently and aggregate information: everything they need is already present in a single platform, the eLearning one. Users do not have to look for or move information in from one place to another. They just have everything in hand, in a single platform. This augmentation of eLearning systems by Federated Search services can be done by integrating Muse® into the eLearning platform.

Schools, Colleges and Universities can use Muse® as a front end web application, unifying the resources, but in the same time they can take the Unified Content to the next level having the searches and results available in the eLearing platform directly.

Enterprise tools augmentations with valuable content

Target: Corporations

Problem: The rules of the enterprise are changing. Fast. It’s no longer about building massive systems then taking months to unify them with selling, product, or service strategies. No one can afford that time anymore.

The decades of building databases, collecting content, aggregating, organizing and creating taxonomies needs to start paying off. Not only has the pace of competition increased, the complexity and challenges it presents require enterprise systems that can deliver insight and intelligence.

Any company may have access to dedicated online services to help its business grow. But why checking for something in more sources, having thus to remember credentials, interface settings and so on? Why not use a single system that will bring the needed information with a single click from everywhere you need?

Solution: Muse® Application brings all of them together, in a single system, with a single representation. Tools as relevance ranking will help have the most important results at the top and even remove unnecessary one for good.

Document collaboration is a very important element in effective team work in your enterprise. The days of emailing documents are almost over, thus the struggle with the reconciliation of version conflicts comes now to an end. Why not have in such platforms all the means that could help building the right documents with the proper content?

Our integration with collaboration software, such as Microsoft SharePoint help users having everything in hand, unified. On one hand they can use their collaboration platform as they are used to, and, on the other hand, they have, at a click distance, all the content providers that may help them create the professional look and smart content documents.

Enterprise search solutions such as Oracle SES, Google OneBox or IBM InfoSphere Data Explorer (Vivisimo Velocity Platform) can be flexibly augmented via specific Muse® Bridges to rapidly enlarge your enterprise internal resources with valuable data from content providers.

Integrated Intelligence

Target: Government

Problem: Navigating the uncharted waters of the global economy and significant social change happening today requires national, state and local governments to have the best possible insight and intelligence available.

Solution: Muse® technology integrates diverse databases, systems, results and content sources across all external and internal sources to improve the collaboration between the siloed organizations.

Law enforcement, homeland security and policy makers can dramatically improve the efficiency of their legacy applications with fresh and relevant content from social media sources — all virtually aggregated by Muse®.

Alerts can be triggered in real time so that appropriate actions can be taken to prevent adverse acts. Contextual tag clouds can be saved and used for quickly analyzing the latest data available on a given policy area.