The Right Solution: Federated Search Tools.

The following is an editorial by Roy Tennant, Manager, eScholarship Web & Services Design, California Digital Library. I recently took library catalogs to task for being the wrong solution for the right problem--general information discovery. But I believe that federated or cross-database search tools now available on the market are the correct solution for unifying access to a variety of information resources. These tools can search not only library catalogs but also commercial abstracting and indexing databases, web search engines, and a variety of other databases, while often merging and de-duplicating (a.k.a. de-duping) results. The market is still in an early stage of development, with products varying quite a bit in features, stability, and ease of implementation. While some libraries may be perfectly happy doing a minimum amount of configuration to the" out of the box" interfaces of these products, a significant number of libraries will not.