Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
Discovery Beyond Google
Society for Scholarly PublishingMay 30 – June 1, 2012
Lettie Y. ConradManager, Online Product Management
SAGE Publications
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
Is there discovery beyond Google?
● What is discoverability?
● Why do we care?
● What are we going to do about it?
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
Discoverability (working definition):
Scholars’ capacity to locate relevant
content in the scholarly corpus as needed
to advance research and other creative
activity at appropriate points in the
academic workflow.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
Discovery – why it’s a buzz
● Information overload
● Distractions abound
● Limited use of library
● Dominance of Google, Wikipedia, etc.
● Usage metrics drive sales
● Discovery drives usage
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
Discovery strategies
Open web search
● Creative linking building
● Open data
● Semantic enrichment
Institutional search
● Metadata
● Widgets
● Training
● Usability testing
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
Improving the Discoverability of Scholarly Content in the Twenty-First Century
● Best practices
● Challenges
● Opportunities
● Recommendations / observations
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
● Scholarly publishers
● Published authors
● Search engine developers, database providers, A&I
● Electronic Resource Management (ERM) and Integrated Library System (ILS) vendors
● Leaders in library discovery
Cross-sector Interviews
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
Published Studies from Europe, USA, Asia, & Australia
Aymonin, D., et al., Be realistic, demand the impossible: Comparison of 4 discovery tools using real data at the EPFL Library. Technical Report, Ėcole Polytechnique Fėdėrale de Lausanne, Switzerland, December 19, 2011.Cai, H., et al. Effective approaches to the evaluation and selection of a discovery tool. In ICADL'11 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Asia-pacific digital libraries: for cultural heritage, knowledge dissemination, and future creation, Springer-Verlag, 2011. Howard, D., & Wiebrands, C. Culture shock: Librarians’ response to web scale search. 2011 ALIA Information Online Conference, Australia Library and Information Association, February 2011. Pradhan, D. R., et al., Searching online resources in new discovery environments: A state-of-the-art review. 8th international CALIBER, Goa University, India, March 2011. INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India.Vaughan, J. Web scale discovery: what and why? Library Technology Reports 47(1, January 2011), 5-11.
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
● Librarians manage institutional discovery
● Publishers disseminate work
● Libraries’ vendors connect to content
● Publishers’ vendors supply platforms
Symbiotic (but disrupted) Ecosystem
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
● Cross- sector strategies
● Discovery tools
● Detailed indexing
● Seamless identification
Improved Discovery Requires
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
● Best practices for online product design
● Open, standardized approaches to data
● Understand researcher needs / user behavior
● Revisit how business is done to best serve users
Conversation Starters
Society for Scholarly Publishing, Annual Meeting 2012 Los Angeles | London | New DelhiSingapore | Washington DC
Conversations Underway
● NISO Open Discovery Initiative
● ORCHID, JATS, PIE-J, etc.
● Libraries at Webscale, OCLC January 2012
● Chicago Collaborative
● SSP’s Annual Meeting!