The hbz (Academic Library Center, Cologne) has a strong focus on search engine applications: Beyond the projected integration of respective technologies into the new release of the Digital Library portal solution (DigiBib6), vascoda background services also apply and take advantage of search engine technology. Experience since 2003 has given proof that building and updating of search engine indexes involves a vast amount of resources.

The use of search engine federations, however, pledges major improvements: The total amount of data records held in linked indexes can be almost unlimited but also allow for a joint output of all hits retrieved. A federation also comes with excellent response times - hits retrieved can also refer to or link into the original system's layout. Nonetheless, the major challenge these days is different search engine technologies, e.g. Lucene and FAST, the variations in terms of ranking, and the implementation or non-implementation of so-called drill-downs.

The lecture is designed to give a brief insight into the hbz search engine workshop with an introduction to the special project state of play.