EBSCOhost Adds Federated Search

Responding to many libraries' increasing reliance on electronic resources and a desire to maximize e-resource budgets, EBSCOhost at the ALA Midwinter Meeting filled LJ in on its own plans to add a federated search service called Integrated Search. The company hopes to use patrons' familiarity with the features and design of EBSCOhost 2.0, which debuted in July 2008, to make its interface a comprehensive destination for user searches.

Integrated Search will use connectors to remote content sources similar to those employed by other federated search products, like MetaLib (Ex Libris) and Research Pro (Innovative Interfaces). Of note, however: EBSCOhost will not charge customers for connectors to any of the EBSCO databases to which they subscribe. For connectors to non-EBSCO sources, the basic cost will be $200 per database annually, in addition to a $1000 annual base fee per site and per configuration. For customers already subscribing to a substantial number of EBSCOhost products, this could translate into significant savings. Integrated Search is slated to go live in early summer 2009.

To address criticisms related to the retrieval speed of results, EBSCOhost will monitor resource response times and offer librarians the option of giving preference to better performing resources based on these measurements. Integrated Search will be able to search local catalog holdings through ILS API connectors as well.

When asked about the advantages of preindexing vs. using connectors to access content from databases, Tim Collins, founder and president of EBSCO Publishing, told LJ that it would be considered if “harvesting is something the market wants.” However, Collins also noted that Integrated Search will already benefit from access to a preharvested index of any content on the EBSCO platform.