I love the idea of federated searches within our catalogue system.A one stop and see everything on offer makes a lot of sense to me. Our students and staff are very busy people. The number of extra doors that they have to open to get to collections is a real problem to them. No wonder they turn to Google so quickly.

I really like using the CSU library PRIMO as it gives results for all their resources. I can also filter my searches to ebooks and electronic journals only.

I have not used TROVE before but really liked how clean the website looked and that the results were all boxed into their own categories: Books, Newspapers, Journals and so on. It was easy to use and very easy to understand.

Follett Corporation creates our library catalogue – “Destiny”. We are remote hosted and I remembered that before we broke for the summer vacation they were doing yet another up grade. They were working on their federated search system called “Universal Search”. I have not used it much in the past because it was very clunky – took ages to load and the interface was not very attractive or easy to navigate.

Inspired by my TROVE experience I tried out our own Destiny catalogue Universal search. It is much improved. This is definitely a feature I want to further explore, promote and work with Follett reps to improve. I have found one of my professional goals for the coming academic year.

Hider, P. (2013). Information resource description: Creating and managing
metadata (U.S. ed.). Chicago, Ill.: ALA editions.