Stanford University Libraries Launches Federated Search
Press Release
March 27, 2008
If you think everything you’re looking for can be found through Internet
search engines, think again. The “crawl” technology of search engines
like Google identifies and indexes only a fraction of all the information that
is available on the Web. The “invisible web” is made up of thousands
of databases and searchable sources that contain highly targeted and valuable
information, and whose content is inaccessible and therefore neither seen nor
indexed by traditional search engines.
These online resources are often the
bread and butter for today’s scholars: news archives, e-journal aggregators,
indexing services, proprietary databases, and subscription services. They
are generally invisible to the casual Internet search. As an example, Stanford
University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) subscribes
to thousands of scholarly journals and hundreds of licensed databases.
And while these represent a trove of valuable resources, scholars have
traditionally had no easy mechanism to search across multiple sources simultaneously.
For Michael Keller, University
Librarian, giving scholars effective tools to discover digital information
is an over-riding priority: “The digital revolution and the explosion
in the number of relevant online resources are fantastic opportunities, but
also a great challenge. Stanford students and faculty need a way to reduce
the amount of time they spend searching, and to make it easier for them to
find precisely relevant information on multidisciplinary research topics.”
To
address these needs, SULAIR has partnered with Deep
Web Technologies to release a prototype federated search service
tailored to the environment of an academic research library. A federated
search simultaneously queries a number of online resources held across
many different, isolated systems and returns the results in one merged
list. This gives scholars a quick and broad view across a number of
possible sources, letting them identify the most promising areas and
resources in which to extend their search.
Three
demonstrations of federated search within the Stanford environment are
now online:
1. All Library
Catalogs at Stanford (Socrates, Lane Medical, Jackson Business, Stanford
Linear Accelerator, and the Health Library of the Stanford Hospitals
and Clinics). (Openly accessible)
2. “Top 10” Databases at Stanford (ABI/Inform, Annual Reviews, Biosis, Dissertations & Theses-A&I, Engineering
Village, Expanded Academic ASAP, Lexis Nexis Academic, Periodicals Archive
Online, PsycINFO, and Web of Science. (Limited to current Stanford students,
faculty, and staff)
3. Stanford Digitized Content available from
http://collections.stanford.edu (Openly accessible)
Abe Lederman, president and founder of Deep
Web Technologies, said that: “I’m very excited to be working with Stanford on this
project. Deep Web Technologies has been very successful in building search
tools for the science communities and national research communities, and the
opportunity to work with SULAIR lets us explore how we can extend our services
into one of the world’s leading academic research libraries.”
Unlike a standard search engine, Deep Web Technologies’ federated search
product, Explorit Research Accelerator, does not rely upon a stored index built
in advance. Instead, it operates in real time, replicating the query and broadcasting
into multiple databases. Lederman explains: "The Deep Web search engine
immediately reaches out to relevant databases at various sites, drilling down
into these information centers all at once, organizing the info and merging
the results in a ranked priority list—in real time. So, not only are
you delving into databases, you're getting the most precise and current results.”
Employing
a familiar, intuitive search interface, Explorit quickly presents
high-value results from a common, single point of access. Explorit is currently
powering a number of science, technology and government search portals, including
National Digital Library for Agriculture, Science.gov, Scitopia, and WorldWideScience.org.
Explorit is also being used for federated search at Intel’s corporate
library.
Links for More Information
RaPIDs Group, Stanford University Libraries & Academic
Information Resources
http://library.stanford.edu/rapids/
Deep Web Technologies
http://deepwebtech.com/
Whitepaper: "How
to Maximize Your Strategic Investment in Federated Search" http://www.deepwebtech.com/PDFs/Whitepaper.pdf
Federated
Search Blog
http://federatedsearchblog.com/
Combined Search Prototypes Developed
by Deep Web Technologies and SULAIR:
All Library Catalogs at
Stanford
http://deepweb.stanford.edu/catalogs/search.html
”Top
10” Databases at Stanford
https://deepweb.stanford.edu/su/
Stanford Digitized
Content
http://deepweb.stanford.edu/digcolls/search.html
Other Combined Search Sites Developed by Deep Web Technologies:
National
Digital Library for Agriculture (NDLA)
http://www.nal.usda.gov/ndla
Science.gov
(Gateway to U.S. Government Information, incl. R&D Results)
http://www.science.gov
Scitopia (Portal containing documents from 15 sci-tech societies
plus patents and government data)
http://www.scitopia.org
WorldWideScience.org (Global Science portal developed by U.S. Dept of Energy
and British Library)
http://worldwidescience.org/
Information Outlook:
Federated Search at the Intel Library (article
available courtesy of SLA) http://www.deepwebtech.com/PDFs/SLA-Hill-Intel-0710.pdf
