Thursday, August 17, 2006

The Distant Librarian: Federated Search Symposium wrap-up

As I've mentioned, I'm looking at federated search and how it might be used to search across digitization projects. Today I came across this blog posting by the Distant Librarian who attended the federated search symposium sponsored by The Alberta Library. Paul R. Pival, the Distant Librarian, provides a very good (and long) summary. He includes a list of questions that Roy Tennant believes should be asked of any federated search vendor. Those questions are:
  • Exactly how difficult is it to customize your interface? Show me.
  • Will we need to redo our customizations with system upgrades?
  • Do you have an API? If so, please show me the documentation.
  • What resources are available for metasearching?
  • And through what types of connections? For each, do you bring back actual records, or only a hit count?
Lots of good information and worth reading, if you're into federated searching.


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