Exploring Discovery Services in Academic Library Context
Németh Márton
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Monguz Kft
Exploring Discovery Services in Academic Library Context
This presentation abstract is focusing on the discovery service tools related to information cataloguing, search and retrieval and their relevance in academic libraries. It highlights the challenges of implementation process and some major effects of discovery tools to the library workflow.
Several major products in this field have released in the market from early 2009 (OCLC World Cat, EBSCO Discovery Services, Primo, Summon) and widely implemented in libraries (especially in academic libraries) globally.
The current draft version of Open Discovery Initiative report of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) indicates a clear definition of the new software services. Discovery service software products are using a new aggregated central index in order to searching across a wide-scale of library related information resources.
These kind of resources can be open access or licence-based copyrighted, offered by multiple providers. A major difference in comparison to earlier federated search technologies as these new discovery tools are offering better performance and more sophisticated capabilities.
Libraries that have purchased these kind of products have major expectations to make available their entire collection via these software service tools
It includes the electronic catalogue of the physical collection, licensed, purchased and open access digital collections.
The digital license providers must provide detailed guidelines of the scale of availability of their content in the several kind of discovery services.
I want to summarize the most important results of an input survey made by NISO ODI (National Information Standards Organization The Open Discovery Initiative Working Group). The NISO questionnaire and technical recommendations are important because these handle the challenges towards librarians, users, content providers and discovery software vendors within a single framework. These are summarizing the recent experiences and provide guidelines for future technical developments.
It could be noticed that the implementation of discovery software tools have certain influence to many major aspects of the library workflow.
I would like to focus shortly also to the implementation main sources of challenges of a discovery service implementation in academic library environment regarding to web-services, digital document management, and maintenance. On the other hand discovery tools open new opportunities in library instruction on information literacy field as well. It can be a really promising turn in order to strengthen student’s critical thinking abilities, problem-solving capabilities through finding relevant information with certain information handling skills and competences. These skills and competences are generally useful and not devoted to one specific kind of software products but can be used with different kind of information resources as well.