Exploring Discovery: The Front Door to Your Library's Licensed and Digitized Content

by Kenneth J. Varnum (Editor)

We're in a new age of Discovery. Not of the physical world but rather one that serves up appropriate resources for your library's researchers, thanks to advancements in handling metadata, natural language processing, and keyword searching. For you, Discovery might be shorthand for single-index products such as Serials' Solutions Summon, EBSCO Discovery, and OCLC's WorldCat Discovery. Yet even those tools require adjustments to meet your institution's specific needs. With first-hand profiles of 19 library projects, Varnum and his roster of contributors offer guidance on the complete range of discovery services, from the broad sweep of vendors' products to the fine points of specialized holdings.

Topics include: migrating from a traditional ILS to a library services platform; creating a task list for usability testing of discovery; managing internal development requirements within the constraints of a small or mid-sized library; applying agile software methodology to a Blacklight implementation; real-world examples of usability testing, including a small liberal arts college's implementation of VuFind; meeting the challenge of three different metadata formats; practices in the Primo community for integrating open access content into the front end; serving mobile users with an app and responsive Web design; analyzing the use of facets in search; using a single discovery tool across a library, museum, and archive; and implementing discovery with geospatial datasets.

Easy to dip into as needed, this comprehensive examination of discovery services will prove invaluable to IT, web development, electronic resource management, and technical services staff.

Genres: Professional Development

306 pages, Paperback

Published May 9, 2016

Reviews

[Birkan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am computer science student and i randomly came across this book. It was really interesting to see how librarians adopted agile dev. methodologies, user centric development and improve the library systems in such a systematic way and this book is full of case studies about how they choosed system X over system Y as diacovery layer or how they perfromed usability tests to see how their planned project would perform etc.

[Bill Sleeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t usually rave about library science books but this one really is quite good! There is so much in the literature already (perhaps too much) about discovery that it is difficult to get any ‘traction’ on the subject. This is particularly true if you are, like my library is, just now starting to consider how (or if) a more comprehensive discovery layer will work in your situation. At my institution we are by choice late adopters so to get up to speed can be hard and this collection of essays proved particularly helpful. It is somewhat uneven in that the few bad chapters are really bad and those I skipped through (no hints on those, figure it out for yourself) but overall this was well edited and assembled in such a way that it will be very useful for libraries that are late to the discovery party.