Lesson 1 Introduction: Federated Searching Defined
What is Federated Searching? Process of searching multiple database sources simultaneously, using a single search interface
More Specifically Searches are conducted using federated search engines
Federated Search Engines Search multiple databases: E-Journal(s) Abstracting and indexing database(s) E-Book(s) Web search engine(s) Online catalog(s) Any other searchable online source
Venerable (or well-known, anyway) Models Dialog allows user to search many databases simultaneously (think: One Search)One Search Metasearch Engines—like Dogpile, Mamma, and Metacrawler—allow users to search multiple search engines’ top results with a single searchDogpile MammaMetacrawler
Federated Searching AKA Also called: parallel search meta search broadcast search one-search cross searching cross-database searching distributed searching single search
What’s in a name? NISO says “metasearching” Vendors prefer “federated search engines” to distinguish products from popular, free, commercial meta- search engines like Dogpile, Vivismo, and Ask Jeeves.
Federated Searching The term “federated searching” came from the Open Archives Iniative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OIA-PMH) vesprotocol.html One server harvests metadata from records in the holdings of multiple, “federated” databases. It is possible to search the finding aids of many archives using one search interface
Why Federated Searching Libraries offer hundreds of databases to search Allows libraries and users alike to manage the hundreds of database search tools.
Why Federated Searching In the age of Google, users expect the world on knowledge available quickly and easily at their fingertips…they expect the same kind of one-stop searching to be available in the library