Last October Abe was invited to deliver a presentation at Hunan University in China for the largest conference in Asia geared to librarians and information professionals. The conference was organized by iGroup, an Asia-based distributor of printed and online materials. iGroup, per their web-site has a “staff of more than 260, [and] continue[s] to focus on the information industry, catering to the needs of librarians, students, academics, educators, medical and health workers and research scientists.”

The theme of the conference was “The Role of the Library in the Virtual and Collaborative World” with an emphasis on how libraries can collaborate to better serve their patrons. Abe, and a number of high-profile individuals from the information industry, delivered presentations.

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I remember well waking up early one morning, November 18, 2004 (no, I didn’t remember the exact date but Outlook did), to a flurry of emails from some of my East Coast customers.

They had seen a story in the New York Times announcing the birth of Google Scholar. A number of questions were raised – were federated search applications such as Science.gov going to become obsolete? Should we federate Google Scholar?

A few months later there was a brief article in Digital Librarian (this article is no longer available but here’s a summary) announcing that “2005 is the year that will be remembered (in the library world) as the year that federated search became obsolete.”

2007 is coming to a close, Google Scholar is still in Beta, and federated search is alive and doing well. In the last few years we’ve seen tremendous improvements in federated search and I expect that the years ahead will be an exciting time for Deep Web Technologies and others in our industry. I have high hopes that this blog can become “the place” where all kinds of information about federated search can be shared and openly discussed.

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