Frank Cervone and Jeff Wisniewski

what is federated search?

• Searches multiple databases at once and presents results
• problems with relevancy in result sets

usage overall is going up

marketplace is in flux > consolidation
It’s a mess!

federated search as one module of a larger effort to integrate all content into a single discovery tool
now work with next-gen OPACs:

• worldcat local
• primo
• aquabrowser
• encore

open source strategies

• Library Find (Oregon state)
• dbWiz (Simon Fraser University)
• Masterkey (index data)

encore from III – has phrase tag cloud, not just word tag cloud; connects to indexing for records
Primo – university of iowa

Looking outside of libraryland

• like something out of Deuteronomy (lots of begats)
• universal repository interfacing > automatic taxonomy generation

endeca: doesn’t count…it’s just the catalog
Siderian
seamark navigator
information mining of MARC records, etc. to illuminate relationships

Enhanced tools
open url referrer

Trends

• number of vendors shrinking, open source options increasing
• Progress on the standards front
  • sru/srw, OpenSearch
  • Resources migrating to xml information feeds
  • SRU searching is becoming more common, better control of search parameters
  • z39.50 is still the most prevalent
• Holistic approach to content
• more affordable turnkey solutions
• data pre-processing options
  • to avoid distributed query model problems
  • harvesting of index data
  • speeds up searches
  • normalizes searches
• inscreased use of visualization and clustering
  • encore, primo, aquabrowser
• greater possibilities for off-site hosting

WebFeat and Serials Solutions doing the most right now in terms of turnkey solutions

self-renewal?
Games: you can stop and save your current location, or go back to where you got off track and go to a new path – need to think about this in terms of our systems > flexible and forgiving