Metasearching Comes of Age

Past generations of school librarians could teach research skills fairly simply. Most libraries housed many print resources, library catalogs on cards with their author, title, and subject headings, encyclopedias, and those fat green volumes of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature . None changed much. Today things are far more complex, with multiple online resources and search methods changing all the time, and that change has had an effect. "Libraries buy many databases, but librarians told us that most of their students would search only one," says Follett Software President Tom Schenck. Follett, which serves more than 30,000 school libraries, responded by creating what scholars of the arcane topic of search interfaces call a "metasearch tool." Metasearching is the ability to search many online resources—online catalogs of print resources, periodical databases, or collections of Web sites—at once. Follett's new product, Find-It-All (www.find-it-all.net), can be searched two ways. One tool lets students search a database of more than 150,000 graded and rated Web sites called "Knowledge Links." The other is "One Search," the metasearch tool that allows them to search their local catalog, the databases to which the school subscribes, and the Knowledge Links sites. This type of search, Follett designers hope, will encourage students to take items in the library's catalog—and the reference and periodical databases—seriously, too.

But metasearching is not without pitfalls. Joyce Valenza, librarian at the Springfield Township High School in Erdenheim, PA, who teaches searching strategy both to her students and to other educators and librarians, explains the virtues and vices of metasearching. She has worked with other commercial metasearch tools, such as bigchalk.com's Retriever and the Gale Student Resource Center's multi-database searching. Planning how to search, she says, is more important than the actual search, and different types of resources require different strategies. "If I were searching the Web, I'd use an entirely different strategy than I would searching a library catalog," says Valenza. "When a search box is universal, you can't strategize."

A search for Civil War materials demonstrates how One Search works. (Note: the following demo was done on a beta version of One Search, so it may not reflect everything in the finished product.) Valenza says that students researching the Civil War often type "Civil War" into a search box when they really want to find materials about Civil War nurses, or details of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Let's suppose we want to find biographical information on Civil War nurses. The One Search designers, it appears, are aware of the possibilities for overload in some topics, and have presented us with three search boxes. If we type "Civil War" into the first, and "nurse" into the second, leaving the third blank, and look at the list of resources below, we'll see immediately why it's wise to restrict a search as much as possible. This beta version of One Search includes many resources—perhaps too many for some students. They include Britannica.com, Microsoft Encarta, a school district's union catalog, the catalog of the University of Michigan's library, two EBSCO databases, ProQuest Platinum, SIRS Discoverer, the Northern Light Internet search tool, and the Knowledge Links database. The actual list of databases that One Search would utilize would be determined by which resources your library subscribes to.

Our search results spotlighted some of the problems with metasearching: lots of great results came back, grouped by source, but students need training to interpret them. Periodical articles appeared that told stories of nurses involved in civil wars—in Bosnia and Ethiopia. When you metasearch, Valenza says, "you have to be able to eliminate noise," and "noise" is results that don't apply to your current need, like articles about a nurse in the Ethiopian civil war. Tools—and training—that help us to filter that noise, she says, are good things.