Federated Search and Discovery Tools

Abstract

The article describes how federated search helps the users to find resources across library collections. Federated search is essen-tially an umbrella search often utilizing, as far as possible, the search facilities already offered by each library resource. Federated searching, also known as meta searching, broadcast searching, cross searching, and a variety of other names, is the ability to search multiple information resources from a single interface and return an integrated set of results. These targets include the library’s collection of books, software, databases and online public access catalogs.