SearchLight was retired on September 19, 2005

CDL’s SearchLight, a cross-database, cross-vendor search tool, has allowed users to simultaneously search online catalogs, indexes, electronic journals, electronic texts, reference resources, and more. It was among the first of its kind anywhere when it debuted in January 2000. SearchLight is based on programming developed in the early days of the web that does not integrate well with the current online environment and is not robust enough to handle the breadth of resources licensed by the UC system.

The CDL has been working with campus groups to build a robust metasearching infrastructure, rather than further developing SearchLight. The Metasearch Infrastructure Project is not creating a “new” SearchLight, but rather is building tools to allow libraries to offer search portals tailored for particular audiences, purposes, or formats. Users will then be able to search a more targeted group of licensed databases, crawled web sites, and harvested metadata, and to gather, create, and share resources.

To learn more about this project, see: http://www.cdlib.org/inside/projects/metasearch/ The first prototypes are expected to be available in late fall 2005 or early winter 2006 for evaluation and refinement.