Fw: [Web4lib] Federated searching-general question re sub groupings

Thu May 10 08:09:41 EDT 2007

Lisa:

      I think you have asked some good questions.  I am at Marist College
and we have been using federated search since fall of 2005. Our students
have been receptive and postive about it.  We have it front and center on
our home page and we have seen article usage sky rocket.  When we set it up
we tried to look at searching from the student's perspective, and that led
us to use the terminology of the Registrar's office.  Each of our federated
groupings bear the name of a major awarded by the college.   That is the
terminology that guides their overall academic experience and we have found
that it works well for grouping databases into federated searches.  I agree
with you that students don't want to have to consider lots of choices
before searching.  They live with a fair number of web destinations for
broad life activities i.e. socializing, banking, travel, shopping  -- I
believe they would like the library to be a single destination.

      You are quite right about the clustering.  Students have been
conditioned by other web searching experience to using clusters to filter
search results.  (They want the movie, not the book at Amazon - they filter
via cluster.)  About 80% - 90%  of the time the clustering will create a
very relevant subset.   Those proposed sub-grouping would have some general
academic databases and they would need to use the clustering regardless.  I
have found that newspapers can present a problem in certain situations.  If
a technical topic has been in the news for whatever reason, you can get the
first page of results with too many newspaper articles.

             We gave a paper on federated searching at ACRL this year.  We
put up our paper, Powerpoint and a couple Flash demos at
http://library.marist.edu/ACRL/Foxhunt_demo.html  .  You can see the
clustering in each of the Flashes.

              Good luck.  I think you are on the right track.

Katy

Kathryn K. Silberger
Automation Resources Librarian
James A. Cannavino Library
Marist College
3399 North Road
Poughkeepsie, NY  12601
Kathryn.Silberger at marist.edu
(845) 575-3000 x.2419

             "Pons, Lisa                                                   
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                                       [Web4lib] Federated                 
                                       searching-general question re sub   
             05/09/2007 10:18          groupings                           
             AM                                                            

I have a general question- sorry this is so long!

We're a few steps away from implementing our new federated search tool.
It has been an interesting experience!

I have some questions regarding how this tool is seen across your
institutions- that is, what is the vision for it's use?

For example, we have created our tool with 21 subject categories. Now,
some of  our subject specialists want to create sub categories, and
choose their own databases to be searched , and put a search box on
their subject guide pages that will only search within their sub
category.

For example, on our main federated page, we have Earth and Environmental
Sciences which includes 10 databases to be searched. Now, the subject
specialist wants to create a sub-category for Geography and put the
search box on her subject guide page. The category may or may not have
the same databases as the main earth and environmental sciences main
category.

My question is, won't this confuse users?  Does this partially defeat
the purpose of a "federated search" by limiting the search to a very
slender set of resources? We are using Serials solutions central search,
which has Vivisimo to cluser results- shouldn't that be enough.

Isn't this kind of library 1.0 thinking- that every tool must be
separate, and to find this, you must go there, to find that, you must go
somewhere else.

I need help here- if I am wrong I need to shut up about it with my
colleagues, if I am write, I need help from all the experts out there
explaining why it is wrong.

Thanks!
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