The challenge of metasearching

The demand for metasearch capabilities – which enable users to simultaneously search heterogeneous information resources – is constantly increasing in the scholarly information environment as the number of available resources grows. To make efficient and accurate metasearching possible, library technology has begun to address several issues. First, information about resources must be accessible to metasearch systems. Such information, called resource metadata, can be made available to metasearch systems in various ways. Second, a metasearch system must be able to convert a unified query as necessary and adapt it to the requirements of each searched resource, retrieve the results, and display them to the end‐user in a comprehensive and friendly manner. Finally, because some repositories are not available to metasearch systems, local indexes can be created to access them. The MetaLib library portal from Ex Libris is used to provide examples where relevant.