Hi, An approach we take with the Kete app is to have each instance have an OpenSearch interface available (i.e. search results can be obtained in RSS/Atom form from a URL that contains the search terms) and then allow each instance to return its own search results in a main results area with a side bar of "external search sources". It's intuitive, works with other services as well (http://digitalnz.org, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) rather than just Kete, and breaks down silos of information. Here's an example of what it looks like in practice: http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/en/site/search/topics/for/levin+fire+brigade?… -- external searches under "more resources" Here's a paper that describes the approach: http://kete.net.nz/site/documents/show/65-kete-and-koha-integration-built-o… -- (click 'view' to download) Or you can check out the slides from a presentation I did at KohaCon10 of the paper: http://kete.net.nz/site/documents/show/66-kohacon10-kete-and-koha-integrati… Finally, there is some example code (a Ruby on Rails engine, so only good as example code): https://github.com/kete/external_search_sources/blob/master/README.rdoc It has an admin interface for setting up your external search sources and then provides some helpers that take search terms and return the parsed and laid out results. If you end up with many search sources, consider aggregating them, much as we use the Digital New Zealand service. For that we use each Kete's OAI-PMH repository to grab all public metadata (i.e. all public text) in Dublin Core about the Kete instances records so that DigitalNZ's OAI-PMH harvester can feed its Solr instance. Cheers, Walter ----------------------------------------------------------------- Walter McGinnis Kete Project Lead (http://kete.net.nz) Katipo Communications, Ltd. (http://katipo.co.nz) http://twitter.com/wtem walter(a)katipo.co.nz +64211241794 On Mar 22, 2011, at 3:49 AM, Tod wrote: