Comments on: Beyond federated search?

By: Sol

Sol — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:48:52 +0000

Mike - I’m not disagreeing with you about what students will do when they don’t find quick results. And, I don’t disagree that harvest/index is great when you can get it. I’m just disturbed by the idea that students and libraries would give up valuable search results from good sources just because whoever they’re getting results from doesn’t include those good sources.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 05:25:22 +0000

If I or other Gen Yer’s can’t find what they are looking for in a matter of 1 minute, they will turn to Google and bypass the valued IP the library contains. Plain and simple. Simple discovery is a must for orgs to survive or go the way of Newspapers. Federated Search may have its place for the time being but is not the future, unified search across heterogeneous data sources is. Plain and simple.

By: Terry Bucknell

Terry Bucknell — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 09:45:23 +0000

It doesn’t matter too much if a particular publisher doesn’t allow Summon to harvest its content because Summon likely includes content from plenty of indexes that cover that content anyway.

And whay wouldn’t publishers want to have their content included in Summon? Publishers quickly realised that by exposing their metadata to Google, usage of their articles shot up overnight. More use means more article purchases, more citations, higher impact. All the things that publishers and their authors want.

It is in publishers’ best interests to make their content as discoverable as possible, whilst still maintaining access controls so that the actual content can only be viewed by subscribers/purchasers (unless it is OA).

I’d guess that technically it is much easier for publishers to expose their content to services like Summon than to implement SRU/SRW, z39.50 etc required for good federated searching.

Our users do not understand why Google can search ‘everything’ from a simple search box whereas our current federated search product only allows them to search up to 12 sites; has a large proportion of sites that aren’t searchable at all; has some sites where the records are returned to the interface and others where you have to link out to see the results; only retrieves a small number of records from each site initially; why some resources take so long that they time out.

Federated search sends out the signal that the library is still old-fashioned and hard to use.

By: Jonathan Rochkind

Jonathan Rochkind — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:07:57 +0000

PS: And certainly there might be SOME content that is available via broadcast search but not summon. And vice versa. Sure. For the academic research market, that’s not important: What’s important is we’re already not being able to offer unified search of ALL content, so switching to a different set of “not all” with a much better user experience will be a win, if it’s the right different set comparable in scope.

The trick is indeed herding all that indexed metadata from many various sources. Summon’s promise is that the vendor will do that for you. If it can be done reliably at an affordable price, and can encompass a range of content _comparable for our needs_ (not identical) to existing broadcast search solutions… it’ll be a serious contender.

The proof will be in the pudding of course. From talking to SerSol folks, they know these are the hurdles they need to clear to make it a realistic product for the academic research market. If they didn’t think they had a chance of clearing them, they probably wouldn’t be sending their R&D money down a black hole.

By: Jonathan Rochkind

Jonathan Rochkind — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:03:31 +0000

“Until every single content provider makes the full-text of all of their documents that can be federated available for harvesting and indexing”

EVERY SINGLE content provider does NOT make their content available for federated search in the first place. Of the approximately 800 licensed databases we have listed in our collection, only about 300 are federated search-able. The remainder are largely not there because of lack of functionality on the content provider’s end, not on our fed search vendor’s end.

So that’s a false comparison.

If Summon can provide access to about the same amount of content as federated search, including our most important/most used content, it’ll be a contender.

A hybrid local index/broadcast search system is an obvious idea. But it’s tricky to figure out how to search both classes of content in one search without bringing things down the lowest common denominator of fed search.