Discovery services at the UAntwerpen

VLIR-UOS WorkshopDecember 8th 2014

From OPAC to discovery services

• OPAC is good• Locating print materials• Known-item search of monograph materials• Locations of journal holdings

• OPAC is not good in• Finding journal articles• Unknown-item searching: subject searching• Journal articles Abstract and Indexing databases

OPAC and A&I databases

• Ever since 2000• Increase of expensive e-resources due to

consortium agreements• Increase of OA content

• Bridging the gap• Federated searching• Link resolvers

User frustration

• Federated searching• Databases connectors are not always available• Existing connectors require monitoring and

maintenance• Time-outs due to database unavailability• Clustering and relevance ranking• Largest common denominator results in lower

retrieval performance

Discovery services (DS)

• Next step in bridging gap between electronic and print collections

• Mature cloud based DS became available 2006-2010• Primo (Ex Libris)• Summon (Serials Solutions)• EDS (EBSCO)• WorldCat Local (OCLC)

Discovery services (DS)

• Central pre-harvested index fed with• Metadata

• From publishers• From local catalogue and local repository

• Full text data (pdf)• From publishers• From local institutional repository• From OA providers

• Search terms are matched against central index• Faster• Better results for relevance ranking and duplicate detection

Discovery services (DS)

• End user portal• Single search box with widget for integration in local web site• Advanced search• Relevance ranking• Facets• Sort• Link to full text

• Direct

• Via link resolver

• Personal account• Autocomplete / Did you mean?

DS at UAntwerpen

• User surveys held at UAntwerpen confirms user frustration reported elsewhere in literature

• Library management• Better return on investment in e-resoures

• Expensive but deep content remains invisible in OPAC• Expected higher usage rates

• Integration of e-books in local catalogue is problematic• Volatile e-book collections• Match-merging• Integration with current subject classifications

DS at UAntwerpen

• Tender procedure

• Award criteria• Coverage

• Local data (catalogue and repository)

• Functional requirements• Administration and configuration

• User interface

• Access

• Knowledge base

• Monitoring

• Implementation / Service

• Price

DS at UAntwerpen

• Project was awarded to EBSCO end of December 2012

• EDS was released to the public September 2013

• Project lead time: 6 months

DS at UAntwerpen

• Impact on use of e-resources• To early for final conclusions• Literature generally reports increase of usage• Comparison at UAntwerpen: Oct2012-June2013

with Oct2013-June2014• High increase in use of EBSCO databases (+25%)• Major full text journal publishers: average + 9%

DS at UAntwerpen

• Where do users start searching• Link resolver shows

• Web of Science: 36%• EBSCO: 22%• PubMed: 14%• Google: 12%• Proquest: 7%

DS controversy

• Roy Tennant - The OPAC is dead• Anachronistic term• OPAC = inventory control system• put it back into the back room • kill off the term and bury the thing itself deep• we have much better finding tools that cover not

just the books and journals in our collections, but articles and so much more

• information discovery has left the building.

DS controversy

• Simone Kortekaas - Thinking the unthinkable : doing away with the library catalogue• more and more users find their way to licensed

journals through search engines like Google Scholar. Users switch to databases such as Web of Science and Scopus or to specialized databases

• International studies confirm this trend• Libraries have lost their role as primary source of

information. So act accordingly• Phase out Omeka • Focus on content delivery

Where users start searching? (Ithaka US Faculty Survey 2012)

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The UAntwerpen Case

• We think• DS is good starting point for bachelor students

and those who need a first quick orientation• DS good starting point for interdisciplinary topics• DS nog good for specialized research even so

because not all resources are available in DS• First usage data show increase of use of e-

resources

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The UAntwerpen Case

• We also focus on content delivery: make library collections more visible• Link resolver (Google Scholar, Web of Science,

PubMed, EDS, …)• Find in Library (through WorldCat)• Publish our metadata through schema.org

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The UAntwerpen Case

• DS came by as an opportunity• Mature market• Budget available• Technical infrastructure available

• Low hanging fruit• Do nothing was no alternative for us• DS may not be ultimate solution but for the time

being it is doing very well• Rome was not built in a day

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More info

• Web scale discovery services / Jason Vaughan. In: Library technology reports, 47:1 (2011)

• Unified Resource Discovery Comparison / Andy Ekins en Lucas Koster http://sites.google.com/site/urd2comparison/]

• Impact of library discovery technologies : a report for UKSG / Valerie Spezi, Claire Creaser, Ann O,Brian en Angela Conyers .- UKSG, november 2013

• Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2012 / Ross Housewright, Roger C. Schonfeld en Kate Wulfson .- Ithaka, 2013

• Discovery Tools : a bibliography - http://discoverytoolsbibliography.wordpress.com

• The OPAC is dead / Roy Tennant – The Digital Shift http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2014/02/roy-tennant-digital-libraries/the-opac-is-dead/

• Kortekaas, S., & Kramer, B. (2014). Thinking the unthinkable – doing away with the library catalogue. Insights, 27(3), 244–248. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1629/2048-7754.174