Federated Search of Scientific Literatures: A Retrospective on the Illinios Digital Library Project

Schatz, Bruce R. and Mischo, William and Cole, Timothy and Bishop, Ann Peterson and Harum, Susan and Johnson, Eric H. and Neumann, Laura and Chen, Hsinchun and Ng, Tobun Dorbin (2000) Federated Search of Scientific Literatures: A Retrospective on the Illinios Digital Library Project, in Harum, S. and Twindale, M., Eds. Successes and Failures of Digital Libraries, 35 Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, pages pp. 41-57. UIUC.

Abstract

The NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 1994-1998, had the goal of developing widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. The DLI testbed focused on using the document structure to provide federated searches across publisher collections. Our sociology research included the evaluation of its effectiveness under use by over 1,000 UIUC faculty and students, a user community an order of magnitude bigger than the last generation of research projects centered on searching scientific literature. Our technology research developed indexing of the contents of text documents to enable a federated search across multiple sources, testing this on millions of documents for semantic federation. This article will discuss the achievements and difficulties we experienced over the past four years.