FEATURE
Search tools
A related challenge is that discovery services inevitably produce far more results that individual databases, which makes relevancy ranking and facets crucial. ‘The quality of relevancy ranking and ability to provide facets is linked directly to the quality of the metadata. If the end-user does a search and a million results are returned, how valuable is that result list if the most valuable results aren’t available on the first page? Without high- quality subject indexing, the user must sift through titanic result lists hoping to stumble on the most relevant articles, because they didn’t appear on the first page,’ said Brooks. ‘The one drawback of all discovery services, including EDS, is that there is no index browse for things like subjects or authors. However, EDS does provide facets for every search (such as subjects, authors, journals, source types and content providers),’ he continued.
User reactions The work that discovery service providers are doing seems to be paying off. ‘We get comments back from users routinely through the feedback mechanism in Summon, and they tell us they love it. What’s more important are the results libraries are getting. A study at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, one of the first Summon users, shows that Summon is driving more usage of the library collection and opening users up to new content types. That’s the true test of whether we’re meeting our goal of getting end-users back to the library,’ said Gersch. Ex Libris has had similar experiences with
Primo: ‘Primo has been acquired by over 750 institutions worldwide, and the feedback we have received from libraries is extremely positive. Judging from usage statistics, one can clearly see that the number of searches in the library has gone up significantly while the average session time has decreased. At New York University, which reported an increase of 300 per cent in the number of searches after Primo was implemented, the average session length decreased from 15 minutes to six minutes. The fact that the sessions are shorter can be attributed to Primo’s relevance-ranking algorithm; according to the search logs at Seoul’s Yonsei University, titles that are required reading all appear on the first page of the result list today – whereas, before the implementation of Primo, they appeared as far away as the 15th page. At the same time, the number of searches grew by 400 per cent, testifying that the system has indeed been embraced.
20 Research Information APR/MAY 2011
are also including searchable cited references in EDS, which should be very exciting to faculty and researchers who publish papers. And by the end of 2011, EDS customers who also have Web of Science will have access to cited references for 16,470 unduplicated journals. We see EDS as a crucial part of what we do, and we will continue to invest in its features to better serve our customers,’ said Brooks. Ex Libris has high hopes too: ‘I believe that
Michael Gersch PROQUEST/SERIALS SOLUTIONS EBSCO’s Brooks said that the company has
not experienced a product launch quite like that of EDS: ‘We have never had a product or service with such a high rate of conversion from trial status to customer status. I think that incredibly positive reaction of buyers (librarians) is directly related to the highly positive reaction of end users. Usability testing with end users has shown an amazing level of satisfaction. We have done and continue to do extensive end-user testing, often including heat maps that allow us to see where end users’ eyes are focused on various screens performing various functions,’ he said.
Plans and predictions With such a positive reaction from libraries today, discovery service providers are excited about the future: ‘EDS customers have helped us decide on a development roadmap that includes: enhanced features when viewing catalogue records, consolidated book records, consolidated journal article records, etc. We
the most important thing is to address the user’s context – institutional and professional affiliations, research area, past information- seeking behaviour, social network, and more. Systems that leverage such information along with intelligence gathered through usage metrics can help libraries provide better service to researchers. Knowing the user’s context and knowing the data – two areas that libraries excel in – will give libraries a huge advantage over web search engines and other sources of information,’ said Tamar Sadeh. ‘There is no doubt that scholarly information-seeking behaviour is changing along with people’s general information- seeking behaviour. Technological advances enable automated systems to be more context sensitive and to tailor services to the individual, thus blurring the distinction between human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. Specifically regarding information seeking, what systems “choose”, out of the huge information landscape, to put at the top of result lists is becoming a matter of focus and decision. I believe that the community’s real challenge is to leverage the developments that are likely to govern general information-seeking practices while retaining its scholarly focus.’ ‘Users have no patience for information
silos and it’s up to content creators, aggregators and publishers to align in a way that will better anticipate user needs and define paths to the best, most relevant content,’ concluded Michael Gersch of Serials Solutions. ‘I think we’ll see continuing elimination of barriers between content sources, turning the information landscape from reactive to proactive.’
Sam Brooks EBSCO
Further information EBSCO Discovery Service:
www.ebscohost.com/discovery Primo:
www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/ PrimoOverview Summon:
www.serialssolutions.com/summon
www.researchinformation.info
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