Using Query Mediators for Distributed Searching in Federated Digital Libraries

We describe an architecture and investigate the characteristics of distributed searching in federated digital libraries. We introduce the notion of a query mediator as a digital library service responsible for selecting among available search engines, routing queries to those search engines, and aggregating results. We examine operational data from the NCSTRL distributed digital library that reveals a number of characteristics of distributed resource discovery. These include availability and response time of indexers and the distinction between the query mediator view of these characteristics and the indexer view.