JISC, the UK-based education and research organization, commissioned a report from OCLC to bring together findings from different studies on how the way people look for information in libraries and online is changing. The commissioned study synthesizes the results of twelve studies. There is also a podcast What does the digital information seeker look like? at the JISC web-site that summarizes the findings.

What did the study find that would be of interest to the federated search community? Here are my thoughts:

• “… there is an identifiable need for training, support and improved systems to help people find the information they need.” As we dream up more bells and whistles we need to consider whether users can effectively use the features we give them today. If they can’t then it’s the vendor’s responsibility to simplify the interface, easing the training burden of the library staff. After all, how many people take training classes in using Google? But, then again, how many people use Google’s advanced search?

• “E-journals are increasingly important to the research process and the majority of professional researchers have embraced digital content”. Make sure you provide access to the journals your patrons need. Discovery services may provide access to some of them. Federated search can provide access to others.

• “Immediate access to information from their own desktop computer is almost taken for granted and gaining access to the full-text journal article is seen as more of an issue than discovering the information sources.” This speaks to the importance of good link resolvers. It’s no surprise that users are not satisfied with an abstract and no way to get the full text of the article.

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Tulane Reference Librarian Paul St-Pierre presents a compelling case for federated search technology in a 31-minute video.

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While the video is largely about Tulane’s experience with Metalib the first ten minutes or so articulate problems that Tulane was seeing that motivate the search for a technology solution and that piece of the video is vendor-neutral.

St-Pierre explains that the problem at Tulane is “too much information.” Nothing new here. But, at 500 indexes and databases and 30,000 e-journals managing that information is a bigger challenge for them than for many other organizations.

Before federated search Tulane had many search tools, many user interfaces, and it was complicated to navigate the different tools, especially with documents being in many formats. St-Pierre described the situation as there being many paths to get to text.

Tulane’s competition is Google. It’s easy and it brings back lots of information. But, as St-Pierre reveals in three graphs, things are not as simple as they appear on the surface.

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[ Editor's note: This article is republished from the Deep Web Technologies Blog. It is Abe's perspective on the launch of Multilingual Federated Search in Helsinki last month. ]

Photo credit: Jakke Nikkarinen/STT Info Kuva Pictured, from left, Dr. Walter Warnick, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) Director; Yuri Arskiy, All-Russian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI) Director; Tony Hey, Microsoft Research Corporate Vice-President; Richard Boulderstone of the British Library and the WorldWideScience Alliance Chairman; and Wu Yishan, Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) Chief Engineer.

It was an honor to attend and for my company to have played a key role in the launch of multilingual WorldWideScience.org in Helsinki this past June 11^th. Beginning more than three years ago, the R&D effort that ultimately resulted in the launch of our ground-breaking multilingual federated search capability involved plenty of hard work by lots of folks at Deep Web Technologies. It certainly could not have been accomplished without our invaluable partnerships with the Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), the WorldWideScience Alliance, and Microsoft Research.

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Here are a couple of fun videos. The first is the Parisian Love Google search story that aired during the Super Bowl. The second is a great parody of a Google search story. Feel inspired? Create your own Google Search Story with YouTube’s Video Director, complete with your choice of 24 different music tracks.

Enjoy!

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In March I reported on an article that Barbara Quint, editor-in-chief of Information Today’s Searcher Magazine, published for DCLnews: Federated Searching
Good Ideas Never Die, They Just Change Their Names. DCLnews is one of the publications of Iris Hanney’s business support services company, Unlimited Priorities.

Abe Lederman, Deep Web Technologies founder and president and sponsor of this blog, was quoted in this article regarding his experience with one particularly thorny aspect of federated search:

So how do federated search services handle [author searching] problems? In an article written by Miriam Drake that appeared in the July-August 2008 issue of Searcher entitled “Federated Search: One Simple Query or Simply Wishful Thinking,” a leading executive of a federated service selling to library vendors was quoted as saying, “We simply search for a text string in the metadata that is provided by the content providers - if the patron’s entry doesn’t match that of the content provider, they may not find that result.” Ah, the tough luck approach! In contrast, Abe Lederman, founder and president of Deep Web Technologies (www.deepwebtech.com), a leading supplier of federated search technology, responded about his companies work with Scitopia, a federated service for scientific scholarly society publishers, “We spend a significant amount of effort to get it as close to being right as possible for Scitopia where we had much better access to the scientific societies that are content providers. It is not perfect and is still a challenge. The best we can do is transformation.”

I reviewed Miriam Drake’s article last July.

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Image and Data Manager (IDM) is an online magazine with a focus on information management for Australia and New Zealand. Today they published an article: Virtual aggregation trumps data migration.

The article starts with a couple of poignant examples of failures in knowledge management infrastructures:

In the United States, federal intelligence bodies failed to “connect the dots” they had been compiling when Al Qaeda terrorist Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab attempted to blow up an airliner in late 2009.

In the United Kingdom, the cases of Khyra Ishaq and Baby P highlighted the all-too-common lack of early warning systems that could have saved the lives of young victims. Child protection services agencies possessed the information that could have protected Ishaq and Baby P but not the infrastructure necessary to alert them to potential problems.

The article argues that trying “to merge massive amounts of information from disparate data sources” has been a huge failure. The article continues with a good argument for staying with federated search:

With today’s heightened focus on risk, many CIOs are now recognising the outcomes that can be generated through federated search. The key premise being to avoid risky and costly data migration or physical aggregation exercises, and leave data in place. In today’s enterprise, data needs to live and breathe in different places.

The article is a fast and easy read and its arguments are worth serious consideration for those in the “federate or migrate” discussion.

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I’ve read many articles about the Semantic Web. Most are very abstract. So, I was pleased to discover “Semantic Web: Your Web’s Smarter Younger Brother” by Tom Robinson. Robinson provides a list of nine ways the Semantic Web will positively affect us. The items are such that we can all understand and relate to. He cites the source as semantic expert Tony Shaw but doesn’t provide a reference to the list. Here are the first five items, listed in reverse order (of importance, I imagine):

9. Annoying ads that have nothing to do with your interests will disappear.

8. Your computer will understand you through natural language recognition. When you tell it you want directions to that restaurant on Main Street with the amazing French onion soup, it will know what you’re talking about.

7. All of your computers will become more intuitive and easier to use.

6. Your bank will implement semantically-driven fraud monitoring systems. And your credit card company won’t erroneously reject your charges for a meal in London ever again, because it will understand that you bought airline tickets to England.

5. New types of consumer products will emerge that allow you to connect to your doctors and other medical experts globally. That means you’ll get a faster diagnosis of your illness and a wider array of better treatment options available to you.

See the article for the full list.

Robinson provides his own list of implications for colleges and universities. Here are the first three:

6. Research libraries already use this technology to connect disparate scientific databases.

5. Students will be able to do class-related research faster and more comprehensively so they can spend more energy on data analysis and writing.

4. Matching technology will appear in new generation job boards to create intuitive profiles and match applicants and schools that are good fits for each other.

Interesting food for thought.

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Last Friday blog sponsor Deep Web Technologies released its beta version of multilingual federated search, available at WorldWideScience.org. Deep Web Technologies and several government agencies key to the effort acknowledged the great accomplishment via press releases.

Deep Web Technologies

HELSINKI, June 11 /PRNewswire/ — Deep Web Technologies unveiled multilingual translation capability today for the WorldWideScience Alliance using its federated search application. WorldWideScience.org, the international science portal, is the first application to be deployed with this unique capability. Abe Lederman, President and CTO of Deep Web Technologies, demonstrated the new technology at the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information’s (ICSTI) 2010 Summer Conference in Helsinki. ICSTI is a primary sponsor of the WorldWideScience.org Alliance, whose purpose is to provide “a geographically diverse, governance structure to promote and build upon the original vision of a global science gateway.”

Multilingual federated search translates a user’s search query into the native languages of the collections being searched, aggregates and ranks these results according to relevance, and translates result titles and snippets back to the user’s original language. The translation, powered by Microsoft, makes it simple to search collections in multiple languages from a single search box in the user’s native language. The Conference will include a keynote address by Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of the External Research Division of Microsoft Research, as well as a presentation by Dr. Walter Warnick, Director of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. (More)

US Department of Energy Office of Science

Washington, D.C.—Scientific language barriers were broken today in Helsinki with the launch of Multilingual WorldWideScience.org. While a large share of scientific literature is published in English, vast quantities of high-quality science are not, and the pace of non-English scientific publishing is increasing. WorldWideScience.org will now enable the first-ever real-time searching and translation across globally-dispersed, multilingual scientific literature using complex translations technology.

“In an increasingly interconnected world, resolving the global challenges of science requires rapid communication of scientific knowledge,” said Dr. William F. Brinkman, Director of the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. “Breaking the language barrier through WorldWideScience.org will help erode borders and build research networks across DOE, the nation, and around the globe.” (More)

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information

OAK RIDGE, TN - Now you can find non-English scientific literature from databases in China, Russia, France, and several Latin American countries and have your search results translated into one of nine languages. With the beta launch today (view the Office of Science announcement) of Multilingual WorldWideScience.org, real-time searching and translation of globally-dispersed collections of scientific literature is possible. This new capability is the result of an international public-private partnership between the WorldWideScience.org Alliance and Microsoft Research, whose translation technology has been paired with the federated searching technology of Deep Web Technologies.

Microsoft Research Corporate Vice-President Tony Hey said, “We are extremely pleased to have our Microsoft Translator technology used with WorldWideScience. Built at Microsoft Research, this translation technology already provides translations to millions of users. Partnering with WorldWideScience is an opportunity to advance science across language barriers and improve scientific discovery.” (More)

British Library

World Wide Science Alliance broadens access to global research with the launch of a new multilingual tool, enabling scientists to simultaneously search and translate over 400 million pages of scientific research published in 65 countries from around the world.

Although most scientific literature continues to be published in English, the pace of non-English scientific publishing is increasing rapidly, with vast quantities of high-quality science now being produced every year. Launched today at the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) annual conference in Helsinki, Finland, a new beta version of WorldWideScience.org will enable scientists to break down the language barrier, facilitating greater global cooperation with regards to the pursuit of scientific research. (More)

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I just found this fantastic article, The High Fidelity Challenge, at ACRL’s blog, ACRLog. For the longest time I’ve had the concern that students pick Google and discovery services over federated search because of the speed factor, even in cases where federated search brings more targeted, more credible, and more relevant results. But, my complaining falls mostly on deaf ears. Speed is addicting.

The ACRL article makes these sobering claims:

Students no longer care about using high quality information.

Students are all too willing to satisfice for whatever content they can find along the path of least resistance.

Students are too dependent on search tools that facilitate their use of low quality sources.

I’m hooked. Here’s another quote from the article:

These are common concerns we academic librarians have about our undergraduates. We lament that they’ve abandoned high quality library-supported resources for those that are easy to find and use but which offer lower quality content. As we’ve been told, convenience trumps quality, and our students often prove it’s true.

I’m liking this article a whole lot. The author, Steven Bell (second place winner in the first Federated Search Blog contest), draws a fascinating analogy between music and search, specifically the quality of music vs. the quality of search:

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If you’ve not seen this parody of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance you’ll enjoy this great video made by students and faculty from the University of Washington’s Information School.

Hat tip to Jenny Luca.

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