Discussion Question 3: Federated Searching's Audience
What you limit teaching federated searching to a particular audience (in the college world, examples might be freshmen, undergraduates, graduate students, faculty)? Who do you think will benefit most from it?
posted by Christopher Cox at
6:10 AM
2 Comments:
One of the challenges that we've seen in implementing federated search in a consortial environment is the range of audiences that we serve, both in types of libraries (academic, public, K-12), and how those libraries define their audiences. Some of our larger academic institutions have an idea that the target audience is the freshman, and may variously see this audience as being well- or ill-served by federated search (ease of use versus lower quality results). I think this kind of thinking misses the point of federated search, which is that it words best as a discovery tool. If you have a user that is not going to further than the discovery layer anyway, you can't really object to federated search being the place where they stop. At least, not nearly so much as Google.
By
Anonymous, at 1:07 PM
Although we don't intend to limit federated searching to any particular group, I would like to see explanations, comments, instructions, etc. that academic libraries are using to "guide" students to select the most appropriate search methods for their needs.
By
Anonymous, at 8:38 AM
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