Librarian Jenica Rogers-Urbanek has a very interesting and in-depth post, Some thoughts on Federated Search, on her blog: Attempting Elegance. The post looks at the barriers that libraries face in getting users to use their online resources. It gives a perspective (all too familiar but well articulated) as to why students don’t typically find the library homepage to be a place they’d think of to initiate research. It offers the view that federated search may be a “temporary” solution to the problems, largely ones of usability, on the way to the “perfect” system. Of course, if “perfect” never materializes then “temporary” might be around for a really long time.

Rogers-Urbanek enumerates in her post some scenarios in which federated search might be of great, partial, or no value. Federated search is not the right approach, Rogers-Urbanek argues, when a controlled vocabulary or a very specific search capability is required that the federated search application won’t be able to provide.

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Research and Markets, a large producer of market research reports, has for sale a report: Academic Library Website Benchmarks. Per the report’s description “[t]he report presents data from 82 North American college libraries about their library website policies and development plans.”

Of particular interest is the second to last paragraph in the description:

Just over a third of the sample responded that they were currently offering federated search capabilities from the website, so that a broad range of library databases could be searched at once. Three out of four research universities had federated search capabilities, compared to just 53.33% of PhD-level granting institutions, 29.27% of 4-year/MA granting institutions, and just 8.33% of community colleges. The mean number of subject-specific search windows offered through federated searches was 19.72.

Clearly there is tremendous opportunity to sell federated search into the higher education market if, overall, only a third of the sample in the study reported offering federated search. Of deeper interest is the low use of federated search in 4-year/MA granting institutions (29%) and even lower level of adoption at community colleges (8%).

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