Databases. They're a funny lot of things really. For anyone who's not familiar with the academic abstracty types of the breed, their front ends depend on which provider you've bought the thing from.

Exploring some more and doing searches and working out what's where so I can pass all this onto to students in at least a semi-coherent fashion, I came across one I'm very familiar with but with a completely different front end. Not particularly better, not particularly worse - they're all much of a muchness these days but different enough to throw you and keep you on your toes if you were going to show them to anyone.

In the absence of an international standard I can only dream of it's just something to live with. But search engines all seemed to adopt Google's 'stream-lined' look. Can't database providers take a leaf out of someone's book, get together and make the student's life a lot easier? (Not to mention the librarian's life.) It's daunting enough for them to have to learn that they need to search more than just Google, but to have a learn a new front end everytime they switch is a nightmare too far - 'specially for those who are proud to admit in their third year that they've never even been to the library.

Of course, all this might be by-the-by if the federated searching we may be adopting soon, comes in. The idea here is that you can do one search that will go off and query all the databases that you've selected. Downsides including too many (possibly irrelevant) hits depending on what you're searching for and the fact that, like metasearch engines on the web, not all features are common across every database.

It's stuff like this though that reminds you we're still only in the early days of what's going to be possible in the future. Roll on tomorrow...