HRLC Technology Committee

I did some poking around and found a few interesting articles about Federated Searching. Here's an article from Library Journal (2003) entitled Trumping Google? Metasearching's promise: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA322627. The article includes an overview of federated searching (they call it metasearching here), some information about the industry standards, and a list of vendors that provided it at the time the article was written.

I also found a good article from InfoToday (October 2003) -- http://www.infotoday.com/it/oct03/hane1.shtml. This article was compiled by Web Feat, who is one of the big federated search vendors. It's entitled The Truth About Federated Searching.

Finally, and this might be of special interest to you, Michelle, I found a brief article about a university who has made the source code of their federated search tool available. It's apparently written in Java. The article's from 2002, so I'm not sure how current it is, but it might be worth taking a look. If you play with it, let us know how it goes! You can see the article at: http://www.cetis.ac.uk/content/20020910140730/printArticle. The source code is available at SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/oaiarc/.