We are writing a book entitled “Federated Search: A Librarian’s Guide”. We are surveying both library practitioners and the federated search vendors to get a complete picture of what the profession is looking for and what the current / forthcoming options are. This data will be combined with a guide on selecting and implementing a federated search tool. The aim is to illuminate all of the decisions necessary in order to alleviate the pitfalls of the process.
There is still time to give us your feedback through our survey and feel free to pass along this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx? sm=Au1Me4INFknkQbscTVcViw_3d_3d
Additionally, if you are interested in contributing your experience with implementation to the book, please contact me (kewllibrarian01@gmail.com) asap!
Showing posts with label federated search. Show all posts
Showing posts with label federated search. Show all posts
October 05, 2007
LITA National Forum 2007 -- Preparing
I'm at the conference this weekend and preparing for our presentation on Plinkit Sat afternoon. In the meantime, I've also stumbled upon the opportunity to publicize our upcoming book on Federated Searching. We hope to provide a practical guide to reviewing, selecting, and implementing a federated search tool to librarians of all kinds.
There's a Five Minute Madness session which affords people like me to ramble on about projects they are currently working on. I hope to get the word out that we need participants in our survey to make sure that we are addressing all of the concerns of the field.
If you have time, please fill out our survey AND pass it along to your colleagues. Our publishing deadline is January and every response helps!
There's a Five Minute Madness session which affords people like me to ramble on about projects they are currently working on. I hope to get the word out that we need participants in our survey to make sure that we are addressing all of the concerns of the field.
If you have time, please fill out our survey AND pass it along to your colleagues. Our publishing deadline is January and every response helps!
July 20, 2006
Electronic Resources and Libraries Conference
This past March Alexis and I were selected to present at ER&L on our federated searching research. It was an honor to be a part of this inagural conference. I was inspired by the quality of presentations and discourse by not only the presenters but the attendees. This was the first time I had been involved with presenting that involved an online element. Participants were given access to Moodle to post questions and review powerp0ints as well as the actual presentation. I thought I would share this permanent link just released by Georgia Tech's Institutional Repository. It allows you to relive that presentation. I hope that our infomration on federated searching sparks more interest and allows the library field to start driving this discussion instead of letting the vendors - mostly IT - drive it.
http://hdl.handle.net/1853/10170
July 08, 2006
Up and running
Last fall a fellow librarian and I were asked to do a session at the Arkansas Library Association on federated searching. Just barely knowing what it was at the time, we hesitated. After some thought, we decided it would be a good way to learn about federated searching and agreed to do the session. In the beginning, the thought was "this is not good" and "it's too limited" and that was basically how we approached it.
We ended up having a ball doing the research and even got to test a couple of the available products. We were "converted." We definitely see a use (need) for this product, especially for undergraduate students (we're both academic librarians). Since then, every time we hear about a new federated search product or updates to an existing one, we're right there checking it out.
Which, in a round about way, brings us to the ALA conference. This year was my first time to attend ALA. Louisiana is my home state, so I was happy that my first ALA conference was also supporting New Orleans. I did even manage to throw in some site seeing. The sessions were good as were the Exhibits.
I have yet to see a federated search engine that I didn't think was cool. I've seen and played with CentralSearch by SerialsSolutions, which will incorprate Vivisimo's technology, providing clustered results and with Multi-Search by CSA. At conference I was able to look at several others that were also very cool: I looked at Ebsco's WebFeat Express (pretty nice); at Vubis' VSpaces, which looks to be very cool and will include an OpenURL resolver, and at Innovative Interfaces MetaFind, which will morph into something more when they launch Encore, which looked to also be very cool. I'll be interested to see it when they're ready to go.
Most federated searching products will do the same thing - allow for subject groupings; incorporate web resources, library opacs, subscription databases; and show where the results are coming from (a feature we look for). Where you'll see differences is in appearance (how the interface looks); administration (who does it - you or the vendor); pricing (most do it by the number of connectors, where a connector can be a database, a search engine, a library, etc.), and fields search. When federated search engines first emerged, what fields they searched were limited. Now, we're seeing where abstracts and subject fields can be searched in addition to author, title, keyword. In short, what can be searched is improving by leaps and bounds.
We're still looking and will post what we find.
technorati tags: federated search
We ended up having a ball doing the research and even got to test a couple of the available products. We were "converted." We definitely see a use (need) for this product, especially for undergraduate students (we're both academic librarians). Since then, every time we hear about a new federated search product or updates to an existing one, we're right there checking it out.
Which, in a round about way, brings us to the ALA conference. This year was my first time to attend ALA. Louisiana is my home state, so I was happy that my first ALA conference was also supporting New Orleans. I did even manage to throw in some site seeing. The sessions were good as were the Exhibits.
I have yet to see a federated search engine that I didn't think was cool. I've seen and played with CentralSearch by SerialsSolutions, which will incorprate Vivisimo's technology, providing clustered results and with Multi-Search by CSA. At conference I was able to look at several others that were also very cool: I looked at Ebsco's WebFeat Express (pretty nice); at Vubis' VSpaces, which looks to be very cool and will include an OpenURL resolver, and at Innovative Interfaces MetaFind, which will morph into something more when they launch Encore, which looked to also be very cool. I'll be interested to see it when they're ready to go.
Most federated searching products will do the same thing - allow for subject groupings; incorporate web resources, library opacs, subscription databases; and show where the results are coming from (a feature we look for). Where you'll see differences is in appearance (how the interface looks); administration (who does it - you or the vendor); pricing (most do it by the number of connectors, where a connector can be a database, a search engine, a library, etc.), and fields search. When federated search engines first emerged, what fields they searched were limited. Now, we're seeing where abstracts and subject fields can be searched in addition to author, title, keyword. In short, what can be searched is improving by leaps and bounds.
We're still looking and will post what we find.
technorati tags: federated search
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