Advantages
Good for beginning searchers
Metasearching is an ideal solution for beginning searchers, who often do not know what databases to search. A metasearch can either execute a very general search of most used databases, or can be narrowed down to search databases specific to a discipline. This give librarians control over the naming of the searches- instead of students having to wade through dozens of branded databases with sometimes obscure names, they can be given choices with names that make sense (English, Science, etc.)
The University of Rochester staff have modified their metasearch engine specifically for undergraduates. As David Lindehal (2007) explains, their metasearch implementation “is helping us to succeed at getting novice users to article content before they give up and turn to Google†(p. 223). They accomplish this by reducing the steps to get to full text- in many cases, in two clicks, the same as Google. Lindehal further explains: “Our focus has been to deliver a few good articles to students quickly and easily” (p. 222). For this goal, metasearch is an ideal approach. Another use of metasearching that University of Rochester technical staff employs is to embed course specific metasearches into course pages, taking the guesswork out of what databases apply to a specific course.
Relevance Ranking
Metasearching provides a limited ability to apply relevance ranking algorithms to content from multiple databases. Relevancy ranking is important for beginning searchers because they will not necessarily scroll through a list of a hundred results, and even if they do, they might not know which articles will be the best. Relevancy ranking allows the librarian to choose the fields and databases that will appear higher on a result list, making it more likely that a user will find good results. In addition, “many library-related databases don’t do relevance ranking or any complex sorting, making combined displays more difficult†(Crawford, 2004, para.6). Metasearching allows relevancy ranking in databases with no such inherent capabilities.
Discovery
Metasearching is one more tool to discover material. Metasearch can lead to a database a researcher has not thought to look through, it can pull back materials one might not find in individual database searching, and it can lead to new terms to search by. As Sue Fahey (2007) puts it: “There is no doubt that our users will miss some quality results using a federated search engine, but it should be noted that they will find some that they would not otherwise have located†(p. 62). Discovery can be further enhanced by additions to metasearch results that further direct the user to specific databases or further resources.
kmd :: Nov.27.2007 :: Uncategorized ::