Weekly Post - Info. Retrieval week 2 - federated search, z39.50, PMH, etc.

Well, this week's articles were quite interesting and covered quite a bit of material.

Both the OAI-PMH and z39.50 articles gave great overviews of the history of these standards and generally how they function. Having heard quite a bit about both OAI-PMH and z39.50, but not knowing much about the details, it was nice to have a little clarity on the subjects. I felt, however, that it was difficult to get a really good sense for how, even generally, the two protocols function especially when compared with one another. Would it be possible to give a general overview of this in class?

The discussion of federated searching in the two articles we read was, I felt, fairly polarized and a touch superficial. I understand that there are a number of misconceptions about federated search, and it is important to clarify on these misconceptions. The Miller article was entirely too optimistic about the potential for federated search to change the nature of the library catalog. Miller tries to draw a parallel between the library catalog versus federated search paradigm to the amazon.com versus google.com paradigm. I'm not sure this holds much water given that people do not use a library to gain access to the broad array of information that the google comparison would suggest. I think, though, that the idea of a large-scale federated search program, like the one discussed in the Lossau article, could create a very powerful force in academic information access.