CIL2007: Federated Search Session

Frank Cervone (Northwestern University) and Jeff Wisnewski (University of Pittsburgh) presented on "Federated Search: State of the Art". They briefly described several of the leading solutions in the marketplace today, including Ovid SearchSolver, faceted browsing in Medline, Ex Libris MetaLib / SFX / Primo, Aquabrowser, EBSCO Grokker, Innovative's Encore, and WebFeat Express. Outside libraryland proper, two products of interest are Endeca and Siderian. They concluded by noting some trends in the federated search landscape, including migration from Z39.50 to XML gateway protocols, integration with other systems (e.g., bibliographic management sofware, learning management systems, organizational portals), and incorporation of visualization and clustering.