Easy ≠ Right

With federated search, users can use a one-box, keyword search approach to retrieving information from any number of book and article databases without knowing specialized search techniques or terminology. This is what patrons want—the simplicity of a Google search. This is what we librarians want, too—patrons to use our licensed databases and find high-quality information easily. But federated search doesn’t necessarily make anything easy. In an ideal world, it would, but no matter the implementation or what technology may come, federated search will always be an overly simplistic solution to an extremely complex problem.

Many problems, many challenges, have simple solutions, or simple enough solutions. Too often some people look to make some challenges and situations more complex than they need be.