4
Jun

I recently discovered a video at the Federal Library & Information Center Committee (FLICC) web-site titled Federated Search Technologies. The video (divided into two pieces) is over two hours long. It includes three presentations from members of organizations who have implemented federated search solutions:

• Betty Day, University of Maryland—MetaLib (ExLibris)
• Karen Huffman, National Geographic Society—AGent (AutoGraphics)
• Tamas Doszkocs, National Library of Medicine—ToxSeek

I can’t tell how old the video is. While the page linking to the video has an April 2009 update date I’m not convinced that the video is that recent. Age aside, the video is excellent and the three presentations have quite a bit of meat to them, although I did find the 10 or 15 minute introduction to drag a bit. However old the video might be the experiences shared are still relevant today.

The presenters discuss vendor selection, requirements gathering, making a business case, installation, configuration, pilots, marketing of their search portals, limitations, customization, issues, and a number of other things.

The three deployments are quite different, making for a nice variety of experiences. The University of Maryland deployment involved issues of scaling search capabilities to a number of sites within the library system. The National Geographic deployment focused on getting training for building their own connectors and for customizing the look-and-feel of their application. The NLM deployment needed to deal with issues specific to medical searching.

The presenters also shared thoughts on what the future of federated search might look like. One presenter, Tamas, discussed the different stages of federated search through its evolution, which I found to be quite interesting. And, the presenters fielded audience questions. There were some slides and demos but they were hard to see.

If you’ve got a couple of hours, or can break up the viewing into a few chunks, I think you’ll find the presentations to be educational. If you’re in a hurry, skip past the introduction. Case studies are not very easy to find in the literature and I’ve never run into a video-based set of case studies before so this video is a good find.

Enjoy!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 1:13 pm and is filed under videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or TrackBack URI from your own site.

One Response to "Federated search video: experiences with 3 deployments"

  1. 1 Gregor Erbach
    June 5th, 2009 at 9:48 pm  

    The video was recorded on Wednesday, June 1 2005, at the Brown Bag Lunch series sponsored by the Federal Library and
    Information Center Committee Content Management Working Group.

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