Webcast Report: Understanding the New Discovery Landscape
Federated search, web-scale discovery (via Summon), next-generation catalog and the rest
Dodie Ownes -- Library Journal, 05/17/2010
What’s going on with search today? “Web-scale discovery” promises to take researchers beyond the simple search and retrieval options of yesterday and expand access to library collections, both print and online.
Moderator Jane Burke, senior vice president at Serials Solutions, was joined by panelists Marshall Breeding, director for innovative technologies and research, Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University, and Helen Livingston, director, library services, University of South Australia Libraries (UniSA), Adelaide, for a content-rich presentation that traced the history of search, explored current options available to libraries, and recounted an implementation of the Summon discovery service.
The webcast, held on May 6 before 700 live attendees, was sponsored by Serials Solutions and Library Journal, and is available in the webcast archive.
History of discovery
After asking attendees to consider the “crowded landscape of information providers on the web” and rapid changes in user expectations, Breeding provided a chronology of discovery, from bound handwritten catalogs to web-scale discovery services.
Noting the current disjointed approach taken by many libraries, where silos prevail and a unified web presence is lacking, he suggested a more simple vision: a single point of entry to all the content and access services offered by the library.
Federated search differs from discovery interfaces and technology; as it lacks a centralized index and provides initially shallow results from each target data source. Discovery interfaces provide pre-populated indexes and allow users to explore the local and vendor supplied content more fully, beyond the boundaries of the traditional online catalog.
For those seeking more information, Breeding suggested attendees check out his new title, Next-Gen Library Catalogs, volume one of a new series, ‘The Tech Set’, available now from Neal-Schuman.
The Australian take
Livingston followed with a “caffeinated” presentation (she was presenting at 3:30 a.m. local time!) that described the eight month timeline, from consideration to implementation, that her institution followed with Summon. Given that UniSA spends approximately 75% of its materials funding on electronic resources and most Australians have high speed Internet access, maximizing online access was of primary importance.
UniSA implemented Summon with no warning: the single search box discovery service was launched overnight. Though a great deal of database clean-up was required, Livingston said it was worth it. Reaction was overwhelmingly positive, and the Summon search box is ubiquitous through the university library’s online presence.
She also discussed how some staffers were resistant to the change and cited praise from some users who had previously found it difficult to discover the content they sought.
Livingston conceded that there is still more work to do with Serials Solutions with links to Australian content, refinement of results and delivery of statistics. Still, in a user survey, nearly 93% felt that Summon covered the journals, books and database they used, and 70% found Summon strongly agreed that Summon was easy to use.
The take from Summon
Serials Solutions’ Burke reported that the company had learned that the leading barrier to discovery was “no clear and compelling starting place.” Web-scale discovery using Summon allows users to retrieve relevance ranked results from the library’s entire collection, with all content treated equally.
Burke highlighted some features of Summon, including intelligent stopword handling and free-form identifiers. With more than 6200 publishers represented and 600 million items, Summon is growing weekly, not only with commercial publishers but also institutional repositories such as DSpace, FedoraCommons, and eprints.
One unique Summon feature is the database recommender. This sets up users to connect directly to under-utilized and undiscovered content that may not be in Summon yet.
Q&A
Burke led the panelists through a brief Q&A session. Breeding fielded a question concerning currency of coverage in web-scale discovery services, noting that the quality of any index is highly dependent on rapid updating, particularly in the area of newspaper databases and current event resources. Summon harvests changes to library catalogs every day, Burke said.
Livingston was asked about authentication at UniSA. Search is open, and users are authenticated by proxy server at the point they access licensed content. Both Livingston and Burke agreed that web-scale discovery services have prompted the need to improve link resolvers that make user access to full-text cleaner and more reliable.
The “Understanding the New Discovery Landscape: Federated Search, Web-scale Discovery, Next-Generation Catalog and the Rest” webcast, sponsored by Serials Solutions and Library Journal, is available via the Library Journal webcast archive.
