1st Edition

Discovery Tools: The Next Generation of Library Research

Edited By John Spencer, Christopher Millson-Martula Copyright 2014

    Discovery tools are now becoming more common in the academic library landscape, and more products are now available from vendors. While librarians are advocating and promoting their use by students and faculty, they are also evaluating their searching capabilities, their usefulness, and on-going maintenance requirements. This work is geared to librarians considering the implementation of a discovery tool. As a result, it addresses the selection and implementation of such a tool, its relationship to information literacy and catalog maintenance, usability testing, and assessment. Issues such as database and catalog searching and the quality of searching queries are also addressed. A comprehensive review of the literature serves as a valuable resource. Librarians will appreciate the highly practical nature of the volume as it is enriched by a number of varied case studies.

    This book was published as a special triple issue of College & Undergraduate Libraries.

    1. Introduction  2. Academic Libraries and Discovery Tools: A Survey of the Literature  3. How Web-Scale Discovery Changes the Conversation: The Questions Librarians Should Ask Themselves  4. Search Query Quality and Web-Scale Discovery: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis  5. Bridging the Gap from Wikipedia to Scholarly Sources: A Simple Discovery Tool  6. Usability Testing of a Web-Scale Discovery System at an Academic Library  7. Information Literacy Opportunities within the Discovery Tool Environment  8. Creating an Actionable Assessment Framework for Discovery Services in Academic Libraries  9. Searchability and Discoverability of Library Resources: Federated Search and Beyond  10. Catalog Maintenance in the Discovery System: Opinions of Early Adopters  11. A Tale of Two Systems: A Case Study on the Implementation of Two Discovery Systems at Davidson College  12. Discovering the Discovery Tool: The Introduction and Impact on Research and Instruction at Seminole State College of Florida  13. A Glimpse at Discovery Tools within the HBCU Library Landscape  14. Implementing a Discovery Tool at Two HBCUs  15. Implementation of a Discovery Layer: The Franklin College Experience  16. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Trials and Triumphs of Implementing the Ex Libris Primo Discovery Service in a Small Regional Consortium  17. Search Me: Eastern Michigan University’s Journey through the Highs and Lows of Implementing the Summon Discovery Tool  18. The Evaluation of Discovery Services at Lynchburg College: 2009–2010

    Biography

    John S. Spencer is Coordinator of Reference and Chair of Public Services at Foley Center Library, Gonzaga University, USA.

    Christopher Millson-Martula is Director of the Library at Lynchburg College, USA.