quality of federated search?

I don’t usually post just pointers to other blogs, but I’m making an exception here. In the interesting new “Federated Search Blog” (Which I think is from someone who works for a vendor looking to get into the library federated search market?), is a great post that explains what goes into the quality of a federated search product’s search, and what might make one work better than another—in a really accessible and understandable way to the non-tech-geek.  This is a topic I’ve had to try to explain to non-technologists before, and one which it’s really good for non-technologist library workers who are using and training users in this technology every day to understand.  From now on, I’ll point them to this essay.

Local indexing of scholarly articles

Richard Wallis of Talis posts on a project that impacts our fantasies of local indexing (rather than cross-search) for scholarly articles.

“By embedding Onix encoded journal article information in to a RSS 2.0 feed it was possible to build a process, capable of being automated, for those articles to be inserted in to a library catalogue without human intervention.”

http://blogs.talis.com/panlibus/archives/2007/02/tocross.php