Dandelon.com is a collaborative community of libraries in multiple countries as well as a search engine, a search or discovery service, a library information system for the academic community. It is additionally a platform allowing registered libraries to exchange library catalogue enrichment data: tables of content of monographs, deep indexing data, cover pages and bibliographic descriptions of articles published in periodicals, with abstracts and / or full texts provided for part of the items. The domain name was created in 2004. It is derived from the plant dandelion. The name is an allusion to the flower's worldwide occurrence: It is thought to spread around the world as easily as human words and thoughts. Dandelon's aim is to uncover knowledge assets for students from around the world. It is free of charge for private use and without user tracking or advertising.
Traditionally, the number of searchable relevant subject words comes up to about five semantically different subjects words, located in titles and generated by human indexing. A book registered at dandelon.com typically is assigned between 20 and 500 subject words depending on the size of the book and the knowledge domain. Based on this extended set of terms representing each library item, queries can be more specific, and relevance ranking can be more efficient. Dandelon.com also expands user queries by adding closely related words (default: synonyms and translations, optionally: narrower terms) from multilingual thesauri from various knowledge domains.
Search results can be restricted to a specific library. Automatic backlinks to the related library management system allows online access or requesting a book. Dandelon.com does not replace library management systems, it is an additional option for searching and first of all a platform for data exchange between libraries associated with its community. Its user interface supports a number of languages, and it provides content in about 130 languages.
The core of dandelon.com is the content production software ““intelligentCAPTURE mobile”” employed by all member libraries. It reads from and sends data to each library management system, receiving text content via digitization and optical character recognition (OCR) for close to 200 languages or via native digital content import. Additionally, it automatically extracts major subject words, which are translated into 60 languages by machine translation. Computers and scanners can be placed in a special mobile furniture to be used between shelves and narrow compactus.
The provider of production software and search and distribution services is the German-based company AGI-Information Management Consultants as well as the hosting center of GBV - Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund - , a state-owned German library service center for more than 800 libraries. The solution was invented in 2001 by Manfred Hauer of AGI and Karl Raedler from Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek, Austria. Dandelon.com shares part of its data with GBV. GBV, in turn, exchanges some of its catalogue enrichment data with OCLC, WorldCat and other service centers. HEBIS, another state-owned service center shares with the German National Library. German National Library charges fees for enrichment content. AGI and a number of the producing libraries have been pioneering catalogue enrichment in Europe since 2001 and form one of the largest communities of producers of digitalized tables of content of monographs in Europe. In 2013 close to 2 million tables of contents were digitalized, not all of which are available on dandelon.com for the general public. The large collection produced for the German National Library is not yet shared and was announced for public use in 2014. Dandelon.com and intelligentCAPTURE are IBM Domino and Notes applications. Dandelon.com runs Apache Lucene as retrieval engine.