CIL 2009: Federated Search Growing Up, Jeff Wisniewski, Frank Cervone, Rich Turner

In his introduction, Stephen Abram noted, "Criticizing federated searching is like looking at your child learning to crawl and declaring, 'He's a horrible accountant, I'd never hire him.'"

Frank Cervone and Jeff Wisniewski

More of the "little guys" are jumping in to provide federated search; example given of EntropySoft.

"There's no value to the user" in searching ALL databases at once. (Wisniewski)

Specialization of search engines example: epocrates, built with Vivisimo Velocity engine. Provides medical info to mobile devices for medical professionals

"...pre-indexing and coordinating and all that jazz." (Cervone)

Trend of desktop searching: Windows 7; the ability to do federated search on the desktop. This creates a technology intermediation; we don't need the front end cuz we can search from the desktop.

Next slide title: "What's wrong with federated search?" Why yes, I do have some opinions on that: http://ninermac.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-reference-and-instruction.html

As a *primary* technology, it needs to die. Vampire killing kits!

"It's not the be all and end all, but it's better than what we have now." THANK YOU.

Serials Solutions' Summon: does all the pre-indexing and coordination ahead of time, which results in better and faster services. (Which is what the SerSol guy said when I interviewed him for the "Why Ref and Inst" article.)

As vendors consolidate and merge product lines, there are fewer choices on the marker. "Realistically, that can't continue." (Cervone)

Trend: increased use of visualization (a la Grokker?).


Rich Turner: The Vendor's Perspective

"Information grows faster than the solutions can keep up with it."

Some important considerations: managing the data and managing the access; accessing the data (browser and content delivery issues; although wouldn't sticking to web standards take care of this? maybe I misunderstood...)

"People thought ABC and NBC would provide quality content...then PBS showed up so we could watch our British sitcoms." (Point being the dangers of letting ad companies, like Google, control content provision.)

Possibility of outsourcing data management? (Slide said "Welcome to the World of IT?" We've been needing to go there for WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAy too long...)

Closing comments from Stephen Abram:

"It takes a village to raise this stuff."

"We've always had false drops. We've always had crap in our libraries."