Customized Search Engine for Canadian Government Documents

The spread of customized searching continues in the library world.

David Sharp, the Government Publications Librarian at the Maps, Data and Government Information Centre at Carleton University in Ottawa, has recently developed a customized search tool for Canadian government documents.

According to a post on the Access to Government Information blog:

"For now, it searches on the federal level, including select crown corporations, the provincial and territorial level; as well, it searches 80 municipal sites from across Canada. (The 80 municipalities were chosen from a list of Statistic Canada’s Census Metropolitan Areas, Census Agglomerations, and Census Subdivisions for Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Apologies if I overlooked anyone.)"

As an example, try a search for "wrongful conviction miscarriage justice". There are results from Justice Canada, the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat, the governments of Ontario and Manitoba, the House of Commons and the Senate, etc.

Sharp writes that he was inspired by the librarians at the Indiana University Libraries in Bloomington, Indiana who developed the customized search tool for intergovernmental organizations I described on November 16, 2006.

Earlier Library Boy posts on customized searching:

• New Search Engine for Library Blogs (October 29, 2006): "LisZen is a new customized search engine that searches the content of more than 500 library-related blogs."
• Customized Search for Intergovernmental Organizations (November 16, 2006): "The people at Indiana University Libraries in Bloomington, Indiana have developed customized search tools for IGOs - intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank, the European Union and the UN."
• Blawg-Finding Tools (November 22, 2006): "Well, the Law Dawg Blawg, created by law librarians at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, describes 'New Tools for Finding Blawgs' in a post from November 18, 2006.The post describes 2 finding aids: the refurbished blawg.com site (...) and the search engine BlawgSearch." The search engine on blawg.com is based on the Google custom search technology.
• Customized Search For French Legal Material (December 15, 2006): "More and more libraries and individuals have been using tools such as Google Coop to build customized topical collections of searchable online material.The French blawg Doc en Vrac has a recent item about a number of searchable collections, including French-language blogs and legal material from France, Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec."
• Customized Search Tool for Reference Sites (January 25, 2007): "Bill Drew of the Morrisville State College Library has created a custom search engine that aggregates content from more than 200 reference sites.The sites are those included in the 1999-2006 annual lists issued by the Best of Free Reference Web Sites Committee of the (...) American Library Association... "
• New Legal Research Engine (February 2, 2006): "The Cornell University Law Library has launched its new Legal Research Engine that helps users find research guides on legal topics from authoritative sources. Authoritative as in Harvard Law, Georgetown, Cornell, Duke, New York University... the top U.S. sources anyway. It is based on the Google Custom Search Engine technology I have discussed in earlier Library Boy posts..."