As promised at June's reference department meeting, here is a place for a discussion of federated searching. We have received funding for and are planning to purchase Serials Solutions' 360 Search (formerly called Central Search), with the hope to implement, at the very least in a beta mode, this fall. In case you missed the June meeting, I asked three questions of the ref staff just to begin a very preliminary discussion:

1. What are your concerns about a federated searching implementation?
2. If you haven't already, have a look at this rough draft of a new library homepage. What should go under "Start My Research"?
3. How will federated searching change the way you teach and/or conduct reference interviews?

Some pros: In my experience, the biggest benefit to teaching with federated searching was that you only had to teach them one interface. There will obviously be times when you will not want to use it; for example, a very specific assignment for which one or two of our online resources are particularly relevant or required. Integrating federated searching into the reference interview was not difficult; a general search for a 101-level class is a great candidate for using it, while an advanced legal query is probably not.

Now the cons: This obviously isn't a silver bullet. It's *another* change to get used to. And while federated searching has come a long way, searching a database's "native interface" will still likely produce better results because each database product has its own indexing, its own way of managing Boolean searches, etc. However, our main goal in implementing federated searching is to make the wealth of our subscribed online content more visible and easily accessible to our patrons, while at the same time making our home page more usable and in line with their information seeking expectations.

Concerns expressed at the meeting yesterday included slow search speed; giving enough lead time to plan for changes to teaching for fall semester; how the faculty will respond; and how we should market it to the faculty. Please continue the discussion below! And please don't feel like you're resisting change or being negative by raising concerns. If I know what everyone's thinking about and concerned about, I can hopefully address these concerns and make a better end product for us and our patrons. Someone else requested that I post or link to some examples so that we can see what it looks like on other library home pages. That will come in a follow-up post.

In the mean time, here is a generic trial of 360 search. Please take the time to conduct some searches using it to see what it's like. We will have a very short time to implement and train, even if we only roll out a beta version!

http://demo.cs.serialssolutions.com/demo

User name: sersol
Password: search

For more information about how and why 360 Search was chosen, see: http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~nmchale/federatedsearching/demos.htm
(The page is password protected, and the user ID=federated, and the password=searching.)