Recently, Federated / Meta search become hot topic. Patrons like doing search in Google instead of library web sites and catalogs. In order to adopt library to the new environment,Many libraries are using customized toolbar to point patron to the catalog and popular full-text databases,besides federated search software like MuseGlobal or Ex Libris’Metalib. Firefox was the first to offer this feature, now Internet Explorer 7 also includes built-in search customization as well. This is very interesting to me.
Adding customized searchs and services to a web browser toolbar requires additional software to be installed on the local PC. Toolbar companies like Softomate and Conduit, as well as IE 7 and Firefox, provide simple methods for adding search services on a web page. Web browser offers a search box in the top right corner of the toolbar. The default search is most often search engine like Google, and a drop down menu displays the customized searches. The user simply types keywords in the search box and then performs the same search on different sites by choosing options in the drop down menu. You can choose the Google option to search in Google, then just clikc drop down menu pick "EBSCO" option to repeat the search in EBSCO databases.
Comparing with full range of databases search, toolbar customized search is limited in functionality point view. However, this is a convenient start point which can provide an intuitive way for user to use resources.
