CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), recently published an article on their web-site, Recent developments in federated searching. The article, authored by Penny Bailey, ILS professional and Managing Director of Bailey Solutions, reports on new developments in search in the UK; a good number of those developments involve federated search.

Here are some of the interesting points in the excellent article:

Frank Cervone, whose work I’ve covered before on this blog, made the following observation. (Quote is from Bailey):

Cervone portrayed federated search as a ‘shrinking world’ ? in which library system vendors, firstly, are merging but, secondly, are integrating with the same few federated search engine tools (Encore, WebFeat, Primo and Vivisimo).

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Last month I posted about Education Institute’s upcoming “Federated Search: New Tools and Best Practices” web conference. The conference just happened and here is my review.

Cervone and Wisniewski covered quite a bit of material in the hour allocated for the web conference. Attendees received a 40 page slide show to follow along with during the presentation. The slides covered these subjects:

• Very brief introduction to federated search
• Screen shots of a number of federated search applications
• Graphs showing upward trends in federated search use at the presenters’ universities
• “The world is shrinking” - consolidation of vendors and offerings
• Simplification of search interfaces
• The landscape of federated search vendors past and present
• Integration of content accessed from all sources
• Open source offerings
• Enhanced tools and features
• OpenURL
• Trends

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Education Institute is hosting an hour-long web conference, Federated Search: New Tools and Best Practices, on January 8th at 1:00pm Eastern Time. Here’s the description from the Education Institute web-site:

Do you have a federated searching tool or are thinking about getting one? Federated search is an important tool that enables libraries to give users what they want: good information, fast and easily. A brief discussion of the mechanics of fed search tool will be followed by a discussion of recent developments in the field. What are the best practices for implementing and configuring you federated search? Tune in and find out.

The presenters are Frank Cervone and Jeff Wisniewski. Their bios are on the registration page for the web conference.

Cervone and Wisniewski delivered a presentation at Internet Librarian 2007 in October: Recent Trends in Federated Search: A Snapshot of the Landscape Today. Deep Web Technologies founder Abe Lederman was in the audience and he reports that the talk was informative as well as entertaining.

I will be attending the web conference and will report back on what I learn.

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