I was intrigued when I saw this blog post from the littera scripta blog. The post references this article, from the Online Education Database, which lists the top 25 librarian blogs, scored by Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati Authority, and Bloglines Subscribers.

Wanting to stay current re discussions of federated search in the blogosphere, I was curious to do my own ranking of these blogs to see which ones referred to federated search the most. So, I went down the list and searched for the quoted phrase, “federated search”, in each of the 25 winning blogs. I realize that this is not a very rigorous assessment; in particular I’m aware that “distributed search”, “metasearch”, and other terms are often used to mean the same thing. I also realize that number of hits is not the best indicator of relevance; a new blog might refer to federated search a lot yet not have as many total hits as an established blog that only occasionally refers to federated search. Yes, this is not a scientific study.

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Most libraries in the University of Wisconsin (UW) system use Ex Libris’ MetaLib to provide federated search service to its users and now UW is putting MetaLib to the test. UW is performing a MetaLib assessment to determine the overall usefulness of MetaLib as a research tool.

By August 21, the MetaLib Assessment Working group, charged with the usefulness study, will deliver its final report of its findings. The Assessment Wiki notes four key expectations of its investigation:

• Conduct a review of the literature and summarize the empirical research that 1) assesses usability of and user response to federated search tools and 2) analyzes user expectations about searching for information in general
• Develop a protocol for assessing the usefulness of MetaLib as a research tool as compared to other library research tools
• Deploy this protocol with selected groups of users in selected UW libraries
• Summarize and report key findings

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Mita Williams introduces the concept of a “Discovery Layer” in the New Jack Librarian blog and provides a reference to the work of the Discovery Tools Sub-Group of Scholars Portal, a partnership of Ontario academic libraries providing search-related products and services. Discovery layers seek to extend the functionality of federated search to improve user search experience, especially the relevance of results of the majority of queries, which are under-specified (just two or three words.)

Williams notes a number of ways in which relevance ranking can be improved:

• by taking into account the user’s previous searching behaviour
• by weighing results by the number of times an item has been bookmarked, printed, or saved
• by using citation information to determine ‘likeness’ (e.g. based on a percentage of shared citations in item’s bibliography)
• by using user-created lists articles to generate similar items of possible interest
• by knowing what courses a users is currently taking/teaching and emphasizing relevant resources accordingly

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In November 2006, the National Agricultural Library, one of four U.S. national libraries and stewards of one of the world’s largest agricultural information collections, hosted a NISO conference. Normally, I wouldn’t bore you with a post about a conference over a year old, but in this one, the list of vendors whose staffs delivered presentations reads like a Who’s Who in federated search.

NISO (National Information Standards Organization) is a standards body, accredited by ANSI, that develops, publishes, and maintains standards related to digital information management. Most well known of the NISO standards are ANSI/NISO Z39.2, the basis for the MARC record, ANSI/NISO Z39.2, the ISSN standard for serial numbering, and ANSI/NISO Z39.50, the client/server protocol for information retrieval. NISO also has sponsored a Metasearch Initiative. The Initiative page explains its aim and groundwork laid:

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CollegeDegree.com has just produced a nice resource, 99 Resources to Research & Mine the Invisible Web. It’s a list of deep web search engines, databases, catalogs, directories, and social media sites. At the bottom of the list are references to a number of guides about the deep web. The deep web consists of content that usually lives in a database, is accessed by humans through web forms, by federated search engines with specialized knowledge of deep web sources, and is not easily accessible to Google and other web crawlers.

I’ve added this document to the resources page.

This “99 resources” guide is definitely worth a bookmark.