EBSCOhost Adding Federated Search
RSSJosh Hadro -- Library Journal, 01/30/2009
- Extension of the EBSCOhost 2.0 brand and user interface
- Subscribers won’t be charged for search connectors to EBSCO databases
- More content platforms vying to be end user search destinations
E-Views blogger Cheryl LaGuardia described yesterday how busy EBSCOhost has been this winter, but there's more still to come: at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Denver, EBSCOhost developers filled LJ in on plans to add a federated search service called Integrated Search. The move was posed as a response to libraries’ increasing reliance on electronic resources and their need to maximize e-resource budgets.
With Integrated Search, the company aims to capitalize on users’ familiarity with the features and design of EBSCOhost 2.0, which debuted in July 2008, and carve out a role for its interface as a comprehensive destination for user searches. Integrated Search is slated to go live in early summer 2009.
Integrated Search will use connectors to remote content sources similar to those employed by other federated search products, like MetaLib (Ex Libris), Research Pro (Innovative Interfaces), and 360 Search (Serials Solutions). The hook: EBSCOhost will not charge customers for connectors to any EBSCO databases to which they subscribe. For connectors to non-EBSCO sources, the basic cost will be $200 per database annually. There will also be a $1000 annual base fee per site and per configuration. Customers already subscribed to a number of EBSCOhost products could see this translate into significant savings.
Search speed a focus
Integrated Search will retrieve results in two phases based on custom librarian-defined grouping of resources. Results from “priority” resources will be returned first, with everything else fed into the results list up to a few seconds after the initial display (somewhat like the way Biznar and other federated search engines built by Deep Web Technologies work).
To address criticisms of federated search related to retrieval speed, EBSCOhost will monitor resource response times and offer librarians the option of giving preference to better performing resources. Integrated Search will also be able to search local catalog holdings through ILS API connectors as well.
When asked about the advantages of preindexing versus using connectors to access content from databases, Tim Collins, founder and president of EBSCO Publishing, told LJ that the company would consider it “if harvesting is something the market wants.” However, Collins also noted that Integrated Search will already benefit from access to a pre-harvested index of any content on the EBSCO platform.
Content publishers vying for user attention
In the space of just a few weeks we’ve seen a number major content publishers announce agreements designed to increase their reach to end users. On January 20, Serials Solutions announced Summon, a new “discovery service” poised to leverage content partnerships with Gale and ProQuest (parent company of Serials Solutions), among others.
