Information discovery FEATURE
Springer said referrals to the publisher’s resources via library catalogues have been steadily dropping over recent years and now stand at around 15 per cent of the total. He also noted the huge traffic to the publisher’s resources from Google Scholar and from services such as Mendeley.
Bold moves
Despite these trends, however, some may still see the University of Utrecht’s response as bold: in 2012 the library decided to stop running the library catalogue that it had built in house 10 years earlier – and not replace it with a new system, either in-house or from a vendor. Kortekaas explained: ‘Like every library, we always offered a catalogue but the use of it changed in recent years with things like discovery tools and GoogleScholar.’ She sees the move as a response to user behaviour and preferences. In reply to a question from the floor about why the library ‘chose Google’, she noted that ‘we didn’t choose, our users chose’.
decision
Stopping the library catalogue was not a taken
lightly. The library surveyed
patrons and made communication efforts to help ensure users were informed of the change. ‘Before phasing the catalogue out we had to prepare users because the statistics showed that it was still used by many and we knew there
would be disappointed users,’ she explained.
Steps to help the transition included removing information about the catalogue from the library homepage beforehand and providing support and information about alternative routes to the content.
‘Six months on from stopping the catalogue we can report that we didn’t face major difficulties or complaints,’ she added.
But this is not the end of the story. ‘Behind the scenes we continue to improve discovery.’ This includes adding holding information to discovery tools, sharing SFX knowledge bases with Google
‘The library surveyed patrons to help ensure that users were informed of the change’
Scholar and Scopus, opening the repository for harvesting, and supporting easy authentication for off campus access. She said that the library would also cooperate with other libraries and groups of libraries as much as possible. In the first phase the library kept its OPAC. However, Kortekaas said that the next step would be to phase that out too: ‘In the world we live in today it seems
silly to ask users to start their search in a local catalogue. There is a lot of work for libraries to do instead of worrying about discovery, for example supporting researchers in data management. With discovery, libraries need to accept that others can do it better.’
Raising the game
Not all libraries share Kortekaas’ view. For Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, deputy director general and head of information technology services at the Royal Library in Denmark, the increase in access via Google is a call for libraries to raise their game. She told the UKSG meeting that she was struck by Chalancon’s talk about how he does research. ‘Where is the library? It’s all about Google,’ she observed.
‘It is easy to see why many prefer Google,’ she continued, giving an example of a search for a famous person in the library catalogue and the same search in Google. The Google results had a wider range of resources and images and were more easy to use. ‘We should do at least as well,’ she observed of libraries. She noted that Google enriches its searches using semantics. ‘Libraries could do the same and can help identify quality and what you can trust.’ Such things
are important because, while Google may be easier to use, the library has a
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