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The sky’s the limit on the form of your submission but you do need to address the contest theme:

Tell us about the most impressive federated search application you’ve ever seen, or about one you’ve dreamed up. How innovative can federated search be? What unique problems can it solve?

Contest entries will be judged on creativity, originality, vision and relevance to the theme.

We’re doubling the cash prizes this year. Last year we gave $500, $250, and $100 to the top three winners. This year we’re giving $1000, $500, and $250 to the judge’s top picks. (Yes, the third place prize is more than doubled from last year.)

If you’re one of the first ten people to submit an entry we deem to be a serious entry then we’ll send you a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate (or $25 via PayPal if you’re outside the U.S.)

Continuing with the tradition of showering the top winner with attention, Computers in Libraries will have the winner participate on a panel in their conference next April and they will feature one or more of the winners in Computers in Libraries Magazine. Deep Web Technologies will pick up the travel and lodging expenses.

Contest winners and their entries will be featured in the Federated Search and Deep Web Technologies blogs. We may also feature other submissions. If your entry is featured and yours is not one of the top three entries selected by the judges then we’ll give you a $100 prize.

Entries are due no later than Tuesday December 15. The top three winners will be announced sometime in January.

Contest rules

1. Contest entries will be judged on creativity, originality, vision and relevance to the theme.
2. All entries must be original work.
3. Entries shall not include any that have been previously commercially published. Simultaneous submissions to commercial publishers or other contests are not allowed.
4. Entries will be judged by a panel of experts in the federated search industry.
5. Judges will not be biased by being told whose entries they are reviewing.
6. The decisions of the judges are final.
7. Those submitting winning entries agree to have their entries written about in the Federated Search and Deep Web Technologies blogs.
8. The top three winners agree to have an article about their work featured in Computers In Libraries Magazine.
9. The first prize winner agrees to participate in a panel discussion at Computers In Libraries Conference in April 2010. Deep Web Technologies will pay travel and lodging expenses.

Eligibility

1. Everyone is eligible to enter except individuals judging the entries, their immediate families, and employees of Deep Web Technologies and their immediate families.
2. No entry fee is required.
3. By entering, all entrants expressly agree to be bound by all the terms of the Contest Rules.

Time frame for contest

1. All entries must be received before 12:01 AM Pacific Daylight Time on December 16, 2009.
2. Winners will be announced sometime in January 2010.

Submitting your entry

1. If your entry can be submitted via email please send it to sol dot lederman at gmail dot com. Otherwise, please contact me to arrange submission.
2. Entries will be acknowledged by email.
3. Entrants must provide name, email, mailing address, phone number and title for their submission.

Miscellaneous

This contest is void where prohibited by law. Any taxes due on contest winnings, levied by any taxing agency or jurisdiction are the sole responsibility of the prize winners.

We look forward to your submission!

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Who would you nominate to serve as a judge? That person, maybe you, needs to be an expert in federated search. Send contact information for the people you would like to be considered to sol dot lederman at gmail dot com, and I’ll take over from there. All nominations must be received by October 31. Judging will take place in early January. Each judge’s commitment will be six to eight hours. Judges will get some free press on this blog.

The contest topic was introduced here.

Tell us about the most impressive federated search application you’ve ever seen, or about one you’ve dreamed up. How innovative can federated search be? What unique problems can it solve?

Please spread the word and, if you’re thinking of submitting a contest entry, you should know that the prizes will be bigger this year.

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Here’s the abstract of our panel:

Opinions about the value of federated search vary widely. Some view it as the optimal way to discover unified content. Others believe it to be a slow and poor substitute for searching the underlying sources. Some see it as a necessary evil and learn to tolerate it within their organizations. Come listen to our three panelists discuss their experience with numerous federated search deployments. Learn about the benefits federated search can offer as well as its shortcomings and common pitfalls. Walk away knowing if federated search is right for your organization and how to get from a blank search screen to one that delivers the results your users need.

Carl, Peter, Christopher and I had a phone meeting the other day to plan for the panel. While we will solicit questions from the audience and otherwise engage them as much as possible, we also want to have some questions prepared to get the ball rolling. My question to readers of this blog: What are the hot topics in federated search and what questions do you have about them? We’ll be paying particular attention to federated search in the enterprise at the conference but, regardless of where you use federated search, if you were in the audience, what would you ask the panel?

Here are a few of the questions we came up with. (No, I don’t want to give away all of them.)

1. Is federated search a dying technology?
2. Can federated search and discovery services play nicely together? How would that look?
3. Federated searching in the cloud: what are the pros and cons?
4. Is there any hope that connectors will become easier to build and maintain?

What are your hot questions?

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Those of you who don’t have access to that paper, beyond reading Mr. Rice’s excellent review, can now read a number of the points the paper makes in the Begley Reference Blog. A dozen excerpts from the paper are highlighted.

The excerpt I found most interesting was about “weaning students” from tools like Google and toward more scholarly applications:

“When searching for information, students will utilize strategies that have worked in the past. If they use the Web for academic research and have not been introduced to other search possibilities, they will likely turn to the Web again when faced with a new information need. This is a challenge librarians face when introducing library resources as search alternatives. The search interfaces in many such resources are not always intuitive and easy-to-use. Federated searching provides opportunities to teach students about academic research by introducing search tools that they will want to use. The single search box model that most federated search tools employ provides a way for librarians to bridge the gap between Web searching and database or catalog searching. If librarians can wean students from the Web by presenting them with a similar tool that yields more scholarly results, then part of the process of developing their ability to choose appropriate information retrieval systems will be attained.” (p 249)

The excerpts and the paper itself provide good food for thought about how students and librarians view federated search.

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While we don’t have all the details worked out we would like for everyone to start thinking about this contest. Here’s the theme:

Tell us about the most impressive federated search application you’ve ever seen, or about one you’ve dreamed up. How innovative can federated search be? What unique problems can it solve?

Over the coming weeks we’ll be fleshing out the details. In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you’d spread the word.

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Slide 4 gives the agenda:

1. Terms Clarified
2. Types of Federated Search (FS)
3. FS Challenges & Benefits
4. FDA Case Study
5. FS Evaluation Criteria
6. Examples of FS Solutions
7. Live Federated Search Demo
8. Best Practices
9. Future Vision
10. Questions & Answers

The webinar is about federated search in an enterprise environment, a topic that’s not covered very frequently. Most discussions of federated search revolve around the needs of libraries, often academic ones, so it was refreshing to view this webinar. Unlike many slide shows, Mitchell provides enough detail in her slides that one can actually follow her ideas from them. This is a good thing because there’s a good amount of detail in this somewhat introductory somewhat technical presentation.

I appreciated the reference to the AIIM study on findability (slide 7), which I wrote about in this blog. The gist of the study is that a large number of enterprise folks don’t believe that nearly enough of their content is findable. This leads to a discussion, in slide 8, of a number of ways that federated search makes corporate information more findable. This slide alone is a good reminder that relying only on content that is indexed does not allow for comprehensive searching.

Slides 10 and 11, a little overwhelming at first glance, show the differences in how humans perform research with and without federated search. Nothing surprising here to those in the industry but the differences are well illustrated.

It was nice to see a number of slides on different flavors of federated search, namely federated ‘master index’ search (slide 12), federated data silos search (slide 13), vertical search engines (slide 15) and semantic federated search (slide 33.) Again, good illustrations.

There’s an excellent in-depth discussion (slides 17-19) of the challenges of federated search that covers thirteen major issues. I’ve not seen such a focused list elsewhere. There’s an equally thorough discussion (slides 20 and 21) of the benefits to balance the pros-and-cons conversation.

What does Mitchell see as the future of federated search? Slides 37 and 38 reveal her vision. Here are the headlines; see the slides for more detail.

1. Personalized Search
2. Better Quality of Search Results
3. Enterprise Mashups
4. Users build the index by their searching
5. Query analysis & predictive modeling on the fly
6. Improved Navigators, Facets, Clustering
7. Web of Interconnected Data
8. Visualization Technologies

All in all, this presentation is definitely one of the better ones I’ve seen on federated search, especially in the enterprise.

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We are … excited to announce that we are seeking the services of four (4) web designers (firms or individuals) to construct the CSS and graphic files for a theme for our upcoming Software-as-a-Service based federated search product.

To this effort, we have issued a Request-for-Quote (RFQ), which is available here.

The response deadline is noon (MST), September 15th, 2009, and we will pick four from the available group of responses by September 16th. We want the project to begin as soon as possible, with a deadline for completion of the project by October 16th, 2009.

It’s very important to us to have four (4) great-looking themes by October 16th. We have included a contest within our RFQ, where we will evaluate the themes submitted and award the first-place theme a $2,000 bonus, and the second-place theme a $1,000 bonus. Note: This bonus is only available to those four (4) web designers we have selected from the responses we’ve received to this RFQ.

Please note the short deadline and help us to spread the word. And, even if you’re not a web designer, I recommend that you read the RFQ to learn about an exciting new direction for Deep Web Technologies.

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He writes about reference books that go back 200 years - city directories - that list who lived in a particular city during a given year. Tim has used these books to perform genealogy research as well as to look up recent phone and address information. Tim states that he’s never found an online service that provides this information.

We’re not ready for a paperless world yet, are we? The folks at Cushing Academy New England Prep School (mentioned in this Boston Globe article) might want to reconsider their library without books. (Hat tip to João Greno Brogueira for the link to the Cushing article.)

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The article aims to see how students feel about federated search vs. searching a single source. What do they think of the relevance of results from each? How easy do they find the two to use? A study was performed in which students were asked to answer qualitative and quantitative questions about the two search tools as used in a research assignment on a topic of their choosing. The article provides the expected background material, a review of the literature, and methodology. A bulk of the paper discusses the study’s results.

An important point caught my attention early in the paper. The “single database” used in the study was the EBSCOhost database Academic Search Premier. This is not what I think of when I think of a “single database.” Academic Search Premier, in EBSCO’s words …

… contains indexing and abstracts for over 8,450 journals, with full text for more than 4,650 of those titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for more than 1,000 titles.

This is a discovery service. I think this is an important point to make because discovery services look to many people like federated search so it’s not quite clear what is being compared in the article. To many students the main difference will be that discovery services return results faster. I think a more appropriate title would have been “Student perceptions of federated searching vs use of a discovery service.”

It’s also important to note that no study compares all federated search tools. The federated search tool in this study is Webfeat so this article is specifically about how student perceptions of Webfeat (for relevance and ease-of-use) compare to their perceptions of EBSCOhost Academic Search Premier.

Another important detail is that the students who were targeted for the study attended library instruction sessions in which they were introduced to the online research process and they were inttoduced to the EBSCOhost tool. But,

“… many librarians have been hesitant to introduce students to the process of searching for articles using UIC’s qUICsearch, the federated search tool powered by Webfeat …”

So, before I even get into the meat of the article - the research findings - I’m very concerned about several biases: the specific tools being compared, the fact that one is much beefier than a “single database,” and the librarian bias against the Webfeat tool.

I won’t go into details about the methodology or the questions asked, but here’s a good summary:

Upon completing and recording searches in the single database and federated search tool, students were asked a series of quantitative and qualitative questions regarding ease of use, relevance of results, and overall preference between the two resources, likeliness of future use as well as other preferred research tools (if any).

What were the results? Thirty one students submitted the study. On relevance, 16 students picked the Webfeat tool, 10 chose the EBSCOhost tool, 3 felt the two were equal and 2 didn’t believe that either tool provided relevant results. On likeliness of future use, most students stated they would very or somewhat likely use either tool in the future.

The rest of the article includes a fair number of quotes from students describing what they liked and didn’t like in the two tools, and what they found effective and difficult in using each.

Do I recommend the article? Maybe. As I stated, I have the concern that the study is not as broad as the title led me to believe. I’m also concerned that the sample size, 31 students, is too small to draw conclusions from. If you follow the research on student perception of federated search and are looking for data to supplement that of other studies then this paper would be a good addition to your collection.

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