The 2016 edition of the PCG Library Budget Survey, a popular annual report that includes input from hundreds of libraries worldwide, added several new questions about indexed discovery services, and the replies were surprising:
Responses show that institutional search and discovery tools (which includes services such as Summon, Primo, EDS, etc.) have not yet reached "widespread" usage. While 76% of respondents are aware of institutional discovery tools, only 28% had already purchased such a service. Take-up is highest in the Academic sector (33%). Europe lags substantially behind North America in acquisition of discovery services.
This session will bring together participants from stakeholder communities - discovery service vendor, library, publisher, and standards developer - to discuss where we are in terms of reaching the goal of making all subscribed online content reliably discoverable from the library website. We will cover topics such as:
- Are publishers providing the right content (i.e. metadata) to the discovery services? If not, what should they be doing?
- Are the discovery services adding metadata reliably, quickly, and comprehensibly? If not, what should they be doing?
- Are librarians sufficiently aware of the consequences of how they configure their discovery service and how it can affect usage of their purchased subscription content?
- How do discovery services owned by companies selling aggregated databases ensure against bias in their discovery systems? Is it enough? And usage stats from discovery services: who gets those? Who should get those? Are these usage stats configured to a standard so they can be accurately used?
