Federated Search

Federated search is a powerful engine that performs a real-time search across all the library subscribed content, retrieves the results, and displays them in a consistent format.

Depending on which federated search option your library has subscribed to (Summon, EDS, ...), you will either be able to use a federated search that does simultaneous searching and retrieval, clustering of search results, and intelligent ranking based on relevancy.

Otherwise, you will have access to an even more powerful module called “Discovery Service” that does all the above and takes the content search and discovery to the next level by performing advanced filtering, presenting more relevant results, and goes beyond library catalogs and other content search tools.

The default federated search services interfaces can be accessed as the (Figure 1).


 (Figure 1)

 (Summon Discovery)

 (EBSCO Discovery Service - EDS)


Tips on using federated search

  • Searches can include multiple terms. “AND” operator is the default. If you would like to change it to “OR”, please click on the advanced search link next to the search button and change “Match” to “Any”.
  • Use * to search for the term with 0 or more additional characters. Ex: compute* will return results for the terms computing, computer, computerized 
  • The search is not case sensitive.
  • Try putting as many keywords as you can in order to filter down to only the content you are looking for.
  • Use the advanced search and combine several criteria like the author, publishing date, and title name along with the keywords in order to get a more accurate result set.
  • Uses the powerful clustering engine in order to narrow down your results only to the subject you are interested in (left side of the screen).