MERLOT Technologies

Essential components of MERLOT are its underlying technologies. MERLOT works with its partner communities to continue to improve and evolve these infrastructure components and make them available in various ways to the MERLOT partners and others. For more information on how to participate with us in our technology initiative, please contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org..

RSS Feeds

RSS allows current MERLOT content to be displayed on anyone's web site. With RSS, the content updates automatically given additions to the MERLOT materials collection.

The MERLOT RSS functionality has been created to allow controlled, distributed access to MERLOT data for display on websites beyond MERLOT. The format is designed to make it easy to incorporate MERLOT content into a large number of websites, portals, and applications that otherwise would not be able to display MERLOT content (or would have a much more difficult time doing so). The content is displayed using the RSS format (a standards-based XML format that has been widely accepted for the syndication of frequently changing content such as news). The MERLOT RSS feeds follow the current RSS format specifications.

Federated Search and Web Services

MERLOT’s federated search technology framework that allows users to search a number of partner collections (including MERLOT) at once. Federated Search can be considered to be a giant search engine which searches across many collections at once. The results are combined together into one list and sorted by relevance, title, or originating collection. Each collection returns 10 results at a time from each service as a default. Users have the option to receive from 5-25 results per collection. All results are presented in order of relevance, as one giant collection on the Federated Search page. The relevance ranking is the responsibility of the search service provider. Federated Search hides the complexity of the system by presenting one search tool to the user to perform the search. This allows the user to get results from many collections at once instead of going to each individually. Thus, the time it takes to find and evaluate material can be significantly reduced.

Federated searching is available in two forms, a general federated search and a discipline-based federated search (that corresponds to each of the MERLOT editorial boards). Each editorial board will have its own Federated search interface and be able to have subject specific collections available in them (including MERLOT, filtered by the subject matter).

Underlying federated search is MERLOT’s Web Services technologies. Our Web Services may also be used by MERLOT partners to search the MERLOT collection from a partner’s web-based application. MERLOT’s Web Services are available to MERLOT partners as part of the terms of memoranda of understanding that define each negotiated partner relationship.