– Is something entirely impossible to do with broadcast search approaches, and isn’t this the kind of control Carl wants? The libraries collection decisions defining the bounds of the search?

Consider broadcast federated search. We are _stuck_ with the search packages that vendors give us. You can offer a federated search that combines a particular EBSCO db with a particular Wilson db. But there’s no good way to provide a search that searches only certain journals accross both dbs — unless EBSCO or Wilson provide packages with those journals.

With Summon, on the other hand, _technologically_ you could provide a search accross only certain journals, perhaps organized in subject sets to YOUR liking.

Of course, realistically, who the heck has time to create and maintain such sets of journals, accross the tens of thousands of journals that we have? But I understand that SerSol hopes to create some themselves. You won’t have to search accross everything in Summon — for instance, you can already limit to just things your institution has in full text. Something our users really want, and which is nearly impossible with broadcast search.

I still don’t understand why Carl or Sol think that the Summon approach will lead to less control than we have now. We already have not that much control, at the whim of our vendors. That may not be a good thing, but what makes Summon a step backwards exactly? If we need to do meta-search somehow (and Carl already argued we did at http://federatedsearchblog.com/2008/10/27/we-don’t-really-need-metasearch…/; I agree) … what’s Carl’s suggestion of how to do it with more control? Current broadcast search technology sure isnt’ doing it.

[cross-commented to dltj.org]