Wired Wednesday: Discovery and Metasearch

By: Deirdre Costello, Associate Platform Manager

You’ve probably heard the terms “one-stop searching,” “single search” or “Google-like” circulating around your library, or maybe even been privy to pitches from third parties about their services.  Discovery services, like Summon, Primo, EDS and WorldCat Local, and federated search (also called metasearch) are tools libraries use to provide users with a single search box that will search all – or at least most – of a library’s resources. The two work very differently, however:

Discovery tools collect and index full-text data and its metadata in one place, which is what users are searching when they search in one of these tools. Examples:

• EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS)
• Primo
• Summon
• WorldCat Local

Metasearch is when a user enters a search term that goes out to several different databases; all those results then appear in the same place and users can navigate to them from there. Metasearch vendors often access the content their customers have access to with a username and password or unique IP address, but some also use screen scraping technologies. Examples:

• 360 Search
• EBSCHOhost Integrated Search
• Encore Synergy
• Metalib

For more in-depth information about the options available and some examples of successful implementation, check out OCLC Research’s paper Single Search: The Quest for the Holy Grail.