Search industry pundit, Stephen Arnold, writes about enterprise search train wrecks in his Beyond Search blog. Arnold sees many enterprise search installations, not as train wrecks that are waiting to happen, but as those that have already happened. Federated search vendors and customers should read Arnold’s article carefully. The article leads with this bold statement:

Enterprise search may be a train wreck for more than half of the people who use today’s most popular systems. The Big Name vendors can grouse, stomp, and sneer at this assertion. Reality: Most of these systems disappoint their licensees. When a search system “goes off the rails”, the consequences can be unexpected.

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The slides are up from the Infonortics Search Engine Meeting that was just held in Boston (4/28-4/29). Here are a number of presentations that caught my eye. Not all are related to federated search but breakthroughs in search should be of interest to all of us.

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Have you ever been bored to tears during a vendor demo? Apparently Marcus recently was and he was proud enough of the fact to blog about what he was doing while the demo was happening. No, he wasn’t paying attention.

Marcus’ post got me to thinking - but not too hard, it being Friday - what makes a demo awful enough that I too would rather read “an article about dental caries published in Scientific Monthly in 1931.” So, here’s my list of top 10 demo killers:

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2collab is a social bookmarking site that was introduced late last year. If it were just another bookmarking site it wouldn’t be all that interesting. Peter Scott’s Library Blog has a succinct description of 2collab that should make readers of this blog curious:

2collab is a social bookmarking site where you can store and organize your favorite internet resources - such as blogs, websites, research articles, and more. Then, in private or public groups you can decide to share your bookmarks with others - stimulating debate and discussion. Members of groups can evaluate these resources (by rating bookmarks, tagging and adding comments), or add their own bookmarks. You can browse public groups and bookmarks, but must register (your name and email address) to access the full functionality – such as creating groups, adding comments, and adding bookmarks.” 2collab is a free service from Elsevier, initiated by a collaboration between Scopus and ScienceDirect.

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A statement in a blog post at Science Library Pad caught my attention. The post, titled “availability, discovery, and delivery - redux,” focuses on the question of how well researchers are able to access the full text of documents they find in search results. The author sees this as a major problem and makes this attention-getting statement:

I’m not convinced that we’re doing a particularly good job of addressing these fundamental challenges even after years of working on proxies, federated search, link resolvers, and “live in your environment” plugins and external website settings.

For those who aren’t familiar with proxies, I wrote about proxy servers and federated search in February. Link resolvers, also called URL resolvers, are worth dedicating an entire post to but here’s the gist of what they do: When a user performs a search, sees a result list, and clicks on a result to view a scholarly article, the URL that the user is sent to when he clicks on the link is intercepted by the federated search application and possibly replaced with a link to a version of the document that the library has licensed rather than the original “for pay” link.

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I wrote recently about Ellie’s review of Roy Tennant’s talk for the Texas Library Association. At the time, I couldn’t find a copy of Tennant’s presentation. So, I contacted Mr. Tennant, and he sent me a link to the presentation with a note that many of the slides are screenshots and, without the context of the verbal presentation, may be cryptic.

Cryptic slides aside, there is very useful material in a number of the slides.

Enjoy.

Ellie of the Ellie <3 Libraries Blog recently wrote a remarkably comprehensive summary, with commentary, of Roy Tennant’s “The Future of Catalogs” presentation for the TLA (Texas Library Association). The gist of her review is that the monolithic library catalog (OPAC) is dying and is being replaced with tools that foster discovery, integration of disparate sources, and Web 2.0 elements such as sharing of information (for getting resource recommendations.)

The world is changing. Library patrons are global citizens. It doesn’t serve the patrons for libraries to remain islands and to cling tightly to their piece of global content. The future, in my view, is Web 2.0 and beyond. More sharing, more collaboration, more mashups, more multimedia, and more global. And, at the same time, everything should become more simple for the user.

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If you were to develop a federated search product for mobile phones, what characteristics would the product have?

I’ve been noticing quite a buzz on the web about the federated mobile search market so I’m curious to know how this niche is being served and how it could be better served. To be honest, I know very little about the intersection of mobile phones and federated search; I’ll be learning along with, or from, readers of this blog.

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In January, I wrote a primer about clustering. I explained that:

… clustering is the automatic organization of search results into sets of results that have something in common. Some search engines and some federated search engines provide clustering features.

I also introduced faceted search, also known as faceted navigation:

This technology guides a user to relevant content by organizing search results in a hierarchical structure and providing labeled choices of paths in the hierarchy to follow. A faceted search system might have a series of pulldown menus that guide a user from the broad category of “Iraq” to “Iraq -> Geography”, to “Iraq -> Geography -> Maps” to “Iraq -> Geography -> Maps -> Baghdad.” Endeca is one vendor that provides faceted searching.

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Last month I gave away three copies of Christopher Cox’s book, Federated Search: Solution or Setback for Online Library Services, in exchange for reviews to be published on this blog. The books were kindly donated by Taylor & Francis.

Three volunteers stepped up and I have commitments to review these essays in the coming weeks:

1. Build It (and Customize and Market It) and They Will Come
2. Challenges for Federated Searching
3. Integrating Library Services: A Proposal to Enable Federation of Information and User Services
4. User Expectations in the Time of Google
5. User Perceptions of MetaLib Combined Search
6. Initiating the Learning Process
7. Librarian Perspective on Teaching Metasearch and Federated Search Tech
8. Developing the right RFP for selecting your federated search product
9. Planning and implementing a Federated Searching System
10. SRU, Open Data and the future of Metasearch

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