Representing Your Open Access Materials in Federated Search

Federated search is nothing new—it has been around for decades. However, it has gotten incrementally better, and projects have gotten incrementally better as well. This article gives an overview of federated search in the library field with an emphasis on open access materials rather than subscription materials as well as an emphasis on empowering libraries to push out records for institutional repository and digital library materials. Federated search is the process of searching across multiple databases at once with a single query. Sometimes it means running a live query on those databases then displaying results together. Sometimes it means gathering information ahead of time, storing that information, and then searching it. Which way this is done is not that important for libraries—unless you are dealing with information that has to be up-to-date (like news) or you have a database that bills by the search/view and you have something like a discovery tool running searches into that database or triggering a hit on your Patron Driven Acquisition products. For searches where information is gathered and stored ahead of time, the information will likely be re-collected on a schedule. Older records will be purged or updated, and new records will be added from each source on a schedule—weekly, daily, quarterly.