Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Customizations Of Web-Scale Discovery Tools In Alabama's Public & Independent College And University Libraries: A Longitudinal Study, Harry Nuttall, Hanrong Wang

The Southeastern Librarian

As digital technology developed to a point that electronic searching for information became practical, librarians began a quest for the Holy Grail of a single-search option that had the potential to harvest search results from the entirety of a library’s holdings. Initially it was hoped that federated searching might be this option, but federated searching was found unequal to the task. Response time was slow and could skew relevance rankings (Thompson, 2013). Further, the first generation of federated search engines proved not nearly capable of searching the totality of a library’s holdings. Something more was needed. That something more was …