Academics Add Federated Search

Broad access to research materials is crucial to the mission of major research universities, so it comes as no surprise that three leading institutions have recently announced the adoption of federated search products. In the hopes of improving their communities' access to electronic research materials, UK heavyweights Oxford and Cambridge will undertake implementations of Ex Libris's Metalib and WebFeat, respectively, while stateside Stanford University has selected the Explorit Research Accelerator from Deep Web Technologies to provide its federated search portal.

Each of these federated search tools allows a user to query multiple resources and subsequently browse through all of the results that have been collected in a unified interface. The Stanford implementation includes a federated search box customized just for the school's variety of in-house research collections, covering 13 local databases ranging from the Medieval and Modern Thought Text Digitization Project to the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection. The offerings from Oxford and Cambridge each provide for a different sort of customization, allowing librarians to build tailored search boxes that can be embedded into other university web pages. These custom boxes then pass search terms through to the designated collection of electronic resources to be searched, while directing the user to a familiar search interface to browse the results.—