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!