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Article: Thoughts about federated searching.(Internet Insights)
- Article from:
- Information Today
- Article date:
- October 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Information Today, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The words federal and federated do not always conjure up positive images. Still, "federated" is the most expressive adjective when it comes to the consolidated retrieval of results in response to a query sent to several databases hosted by different online information systems. Federated searching consists of transforming a query and broadcasting it to a group of disparate databases with the appropriate syntax, merging the results collected from the databases, presenting them in a succinct and unified format with minimal duplication, and allowing the library patron to sort the merged result set by various criteria.
The Need for Federation
Large libraries ...