April 29, 2007

Rails Federated Search App

I just heard about LibraryFind, a federated search tool for libraries, written in Rails. I probably won't run out and replace the (also Rails-powered, in part) federated search tool that we have, but it is great to hear about other tools out there.

A couple of interesting things here:
* It is open source -- a very nice feature considering that many commercial products can be fairly pricey.
* The authors seem to emphasize ease-of-use with their "Two clicks - one click to find, one click to get" mantra. The commerical products I've seen tend to be *way* too complicated for most end users. That's a big reason why we rolled our own solution...