(L-R) Marshall Breeding, Frank Cervone, Jeff Wisnewski
This illustrious panel of experts presented a review of discovery systems and their capabilities and interfaces.
Discovery started with catalog cards, now a thing of the past (at least physically). Now we are trying to provide access to more and more information. The problem is that we have lots of different silos of content, which leads to a disjointed approach to information and service delivery. Federated search was tried, in which searches were passed to several systems, with the results integrated in some way. But you have to choose which resources federated search will look at.
We started moving beyond federated search by modernizing the interface, with a single search box, query tools, relevance ranked results, etc. Next generation interfaces are decoupled from the library management systems.
Discovery interfaces do well with library catalog information but have a hard time with articles. Open source as well as proprietary systems exist.
The current phase of discovery systems is focused on pre-populated indexes that aim to deliver web-scale discovery. Mixing article and book records is still a major challenge.
Social discovery is a new advance that integrates social data into a discovery system. It builds on modernized library catalog interfaces. Users are invited to contribute their recommendations and reviews; BiblioCommons is an example of a social discovery platform allowing this. The user-supplied data becomes part of the discovery process and allows users to help each other.
We tend to think about the part of our collection exposed by the discovery layers as bigger, better, or somehow more improved than the rest of it.
With federated search, you are only looking at a small part of all your resources, and the systems will return only a few results instead of all that are in your collection.
Web scale discovery is close to where we have been trying to get for a long time. You might give up some flexibility and sophistication and control unless you are using the API.
The traditional approach is to bring everything in-house, which gives complete control. But you also have complete responsibility and have to fix all problems, which isn’t practical for many of us. Hosted systems give the vendor some responsibility; Software as a Service (SaaS) gives them primary responsibility. This gives a higher return on assets and saves costs, and the cycle time decreases–it is possible to get a total system up in 3 months. We don’t have the time to spend years getting a system up and running.
The benefits are that we can focus on functionality. Applications are safeguarded, even if the host system goes down. Use of e-resources has increased, which allows focus on value added services–making sure search results are tuned and precise.
Comments are closed.