Back in December ACRLog, the blog for ACRL, ran a post titled Pay Some Attention To The Research. The blog post refers to two research articles. The first article referenced is titled “Portals for Undergraduate Subject Searching: Are They Worth It?” While that article is certainly worthy of attention, what hooked me about this blog post was the reference to and discussion of the second article, “Undergraduate Use of Federated Searching: A Survey of Preferences and Perceptions of Value-Added Functionality.” This article, by Belliston, et al, was published in the November 2007 issue of “College & Research Libraries.” While the full-text is only available from ALA to ACRL members, through the wonders of Google one can find a free copy of the article at Brigham Young University, where the research for this article was conducted.

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A couple of months ago I gave a brief presentation at the Enterprise Search Summit West in San Jose (actually, officially I was speaking at the KMWorld & Intranets show) making the claim that Federated Search is the technology that can unify disparate content within a company.

The talk was titled “Federated Search: True Enterprise Search.” Here is the abstract from that talk:

Enterprise Search Software as it is known today, whether from Autonomy, Endeca, FAST or others, cannot provide access to all the information of value at any reasonably sized organization with a single search. Organizational information-content exists in numerous silos accessible through a myriad of individual, incompatible indices-engines. Technical, cost and bureaucratic reasons prevent unifying all these various enterprise silos under one index.

State-of-the-art Federated Search software provides actual enterprise (-wide) single point of search-access to most, if not all, of the information repositories of value to an enterprise, including those beyond the firewall.

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Outsell Inc. is a research and advisory firm. They cover a number of information industry segments, including search, aggregation and syndication. In August they produced a report related to federated search:

Information Management Best Practices: The Future of Federated Search. August 16, 2007. The abstract begins:

Federated search goes beyond searching the open web a la Google to include subscription-based content in a variety of databases. This report examines what federated search is and how it has evolved, and makes recommendations for information managers who want to offer their users more valuable search tools.

I have not read the report so I have no opinion about it. There is, however, a post on August 20 titled Analysis of federated search from the Family Man Librarian blog with impressions of the report from long-time librarian Steve Oberg. While Oberg’s post is definitely worth reading he does leave us hanging with this comment:

The report’s authors argue that federated search vendors haven’t much to fear from Google, and they go on to articulate why this is the case. They see a good future for federated search.

I’m interested to know the specifics of the analysis leading to this statement so I might just need to get a copy of this report for myself.

Research and Markets, a large producer of market research reports, has for sale a report: Academic Library Website Benchmarks. Per the report’s description “[t]he report presents data from 82 North American college libraries about their library website policies and development plans.”

Of particular interest is the second to last paragraph in the description:

Just over a third of the sample responded that they were currently offering federated search capabilities from the website, so that a broad range of library databases could be searched at once. Three out of four research universities had federated search capabilities, compared to just 53.33% of PhD-level granting institutions, 29.27% of 4-year/MA granting institutions, and just 8.33% of community colleges. The mean number of subject-specific search windows offered through federated searches was 19.72.

Clearly there is tremendous opportunity to sell federated search into the higher education market if, overall, only a third of the sample in the study reported offering federated search. Of deeper interest is the low use of federated search in 4-year/MA granting institutions (29%) and even lower level of adoption at community colleges (8%).

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In June of this year, Barclay Hill of Intel delivered a presentation to the Special Libraries Association (SLA) at its Annual Conference about Intel’s experience bringing federated search to their corporate library. Hill is manager of the Web and Systems Group at the Intel Library at Intel Corporation. Associated with the presentation is an article, “Federated Search at the Intel Library.” A revised version of the article was published in the September 2007 edition of Information Outlook, SLA’s monthly magazine. SLA has given permission for Deep Web Technologies, whose federated search technology was selected by Intel and who is referenced in the article, to post the article on Deep Web Tech’s web-site. Please follow this link to the article.

Hill’s article is a case study in bringing federated search to Intel from requirements through implementation. The article should be of interest to anyone exploring a federated search solution for a corporate environment as this topic is not widely covered in the literature, especially discussion of a large-scale deployment within a multinational corporation. We welcome hearing of your experiences with federated search in the corporation, or elsewhere, through comments in this blog, through guest posts, and through references to relevant articles.