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Case Study
Inside Indiana U's Move to ChaCha
University to bolster research with guided search functionality
8/8/2007
Indiana University's alliance with search firm ChaCha, announced last week, may portend how universities, librarians, and Internet search engines will work together in the future. The arrangement points up how librarians or other experts can add huge value to scholarly searches through so-called "guided searches" by stepping in to offer access to vast amounts of material--and expertise--that conventional search engines don't touch.Thursday IU announced an agreement with ChaCha, a search firm that was founded by two IU alumni and is located near the Bloomington campus. Under the strategic alliance, IU will work with ChaCha to develop Web-based research tools and services. In an initial project, IU will offer human-aided academic search services through ChaCha that will augment what students, faculty and staff can do now through any public search engine, including ChaCha or Google. ChaCha specializes in just that: machine-based searches augmented by knowledgeable human guides.
Tapping Expertise
That sort of guided search will allow librarians to augment scholarly searches because they have access to huge amounts of journals, databases, and indices beyond the reach of conventional search engines owing to copyright and subscription restrictions, among other things. In a guided search, a librarian or other IU expert can step in to help a searcher find a reference within that otherwise largely hidden trove of material.
Capabilities that make ChaCha a good choice for the university's guided search project, according to Vice President for IT Brad Wheeler, is a mechanism in ChaCha that allows it to route and match a particular inquiry to an available human guide. Another feature ChaCha offers, Wheeler said, is a constant refinement of its internal knowledgebase of answers, rather than offering an answer gleaned through a standard algorithmic search. That feature will help IU build its search knowledgebase, a key part of the project. "We would never be able to fund building and maintaining a knowledgebase" of the scope he envisions, Wheeler said, without using the ChaCha platform.
IU librarians already routinely help students and faculty, as well as the public, with online searches by answering chat, e-mail, and instant message queries. According to Carolyn Walters, executive associate dean of IU's Bloomington libraries, IU Bloomington and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis librarians answered more than 150,000 search queries last year. The arrangement with ChaCha will formalize and standardize that service somewhat.
The Two Step: Building a Knowledgebase
Once the pilot project launches--and the university plans to have it in place when students return to campus late this month-- searches provided through IU's search portal at http://search.iu.edu, through the university's well known and widely used IT knowledgebase at
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