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It's a common problem. While librarians choose resources thoughtfully to support teaching and learning, they find that their staff and students are confounded by dissimilar search interfaces that discourage the full use of these carefully selected resources. So it is heartening to report that an electronic solution may be close at hand-the common user interface, or federated search.
Federated search software is designed for the hybrid library that contains both print and electronic document collections. Most school libraries provide access to a range of information sources, including the Internet and online multimedia content, electronic journals, electronic documents, and databases of indexed or full-text journal articles as well as an online catalog of traditional print and media. A federated search broadcasts a query across these databases, returning organized results to the user. When it works well it reduces the time and effort spent in both searching and learning to use the interfaces of various databases. As Fiehn suggests, this "encourages students to search more deeply, and has the prospect of facilitating better results."1
Although the technology is relatively young, a wide range of functional products is available. Fryer notes that "libraries now have an excellent opportunity to provide a simple, yet powerful interface that out-Googles Google."2
A Step Forward or Back?
In concept, librarians praise the idea of a single search interface. In practice, they are concerned that searching might only work at the lowest common denominator. Since individual databases have their own unique fields, controlled vocabularies, commands, and syntax, librarians worry that the power of an individual database search might be sacrificed in the federated search process. Successful academic searchers choose an appropriate resource and then focus their search using Boolean logic, indexing, and other limits. Frost argues that "selecting a research tool is one of the first concepts that should be learned" in information literacy.' He goes on to say that metasearching is "a step backward, a way of avoiding the learning process."4 From an information literacy perspective, the federated search environment allows users to abandon traditional search skills in favor of a Google-style, keyword approach.
The lure of a single empty search box is strong among nonlibrarians. As Luther points out, "like it or not, Google and its competitor search engines have created...