Peter Chapman recently e-mailed me, noting that he’d seen my last post because Sol Lederman (who writes at the Federated Search Blog) kindly linked to me.
Sol notes that he “didn’t realize that federated search doesn’t work.” I wanted to clarify what I meant by that comment in my last post; I did not mean to imply that federated search as a whole does not work. I meant to refer to a very specific set of tools created by well-known library vendors. (Also, I did not mean to imply that their products don’t work, per se, but that I don’t think they’re very good at meeting the needs of our users.) If I understand their technology correctly, both Google Scholar and Scirus are federated search technologies (please correct me if I’m wrong) and I have found both of these tools to work well.
Many thanks to Sol for being good-natured about my comment while still making me realize I should have been more precise in my statements!