FEATURE Information discovery
wealth of specialist knowledge. ‘It is important to teach students to evaluate quality, relevance and value to them,’ she said. However, she added that people will only use the library to search for external resources if the library adds value – and here she sees a need for the library to do marketing. She also suggested that libraries could put a price tag on the resources they supply. This is not that users have to pay but to make them aware of costs and the library’s role in supplying quality content. This, she said, would be useful in, for example, communicating about open access. ‘Libraries need to add value, support users to judge quality, provide semantics and cloud technology and support different delivery channels,’ she explained. ‘Either we can all go to Google or can look
at how we can add value ourselves – and I think it’s worth doing,’ she said. Some might be more comfortable with this approach than with Utrecht’s. As someone observed from the floor, ‘What if everything’s via Google and then Google pulls Google Scholar with one month’s notice? They’ve done it before.’
There is also plenty of interest in accessing library content using dedicated discovery tools. This is an area that researchers at the LISU department of Loughborough University, UK have been looking into, as Valérie Spezi, explained in her talk. Speaking about a recent LISU study that she was involved in into the impact of library discovery technology in the UK, she noted that 77 per cent of UK higher education libraries are already using resource discovery systems (RDS), with a further 11 per cent in the process of
‘77 per cent of UK higher education libraries are already using resource discovery systems’
implementing one. She added that the market is dominated by Primo (from Ex Libris), EDS (from EBSCO) and Summon (from ProQuest). ‘Libraries want to offer a Google-like experience – and this seems to be working; user feedback is very positive,’ she said. She noted that LISU’s study showed that the impact of RDS technology is mainly seen in the increased use of e-books, more than journals, although she said that it is hard to isolate RDS from other factors.
When it comes to publishers, she said that visibility and discoverability are the main drivers for publishers to engage with RDS technologies. However, she added that they have no clear evidence of the effect of such tools on usage, an
14 Research Information JUNE/JULY 2014
Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, deputy director general at the Royal Library in Denmark
observation that was disputed from the floor by a delegate from Springer who said that the publisher did know how much traffic comes via RDS tools. Spezi also suggested that RDS tools might bring more benefits for smaller publishers than the bigger ones. She added that there are challenges for publishers, including that RDS tools focus more on their library customers than on publishers and that work may be required on the metadata. ‘Publishers should engage and work closely with libraries and RDS suppliers to optimise discoverability,’ she said.
The impact of discovery systems on journal usage has been the subject of another study, by Michael Levine-Clark of the University of Denver, John McDonald of the University of Southern California and Jason Price of the SCELC Consortium. The researchers carried out a longitudinal study of journal use that focused on the use of Primo, Summon, EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) and WorldCat Local. The study included 33 libraries, six that use each of the four discovery tools and nine controls that have not yet implemented discovery tools. The libraries were all in English-speaking countries: 28 in the USA, two in Canada, one in Australia, one in New Zealand and one in the UK.
The study compared usage, based on the COUNTER JR1 (full text downloads per title) reports for the year before and the year after implementation of the discovery service (or the two consecutive years in the same period but without implementation in the case of the controls). The survey included data from six publishers and 9,206 journals.
In most cases journal usage increased over the
two years of the study, although usage dropped for six of the libraries, including at least one of the controls. The study results showed that journal usage at Summon and Primo institutions increased more than with the other two services in the study and the control group. Increases observed with EDS and WorldCat Local were roughly in line with those observed with the control group, according to McDonald. The study also showed that the impact of discovery services differs across publishers. ‘It is interesting to note that the mean usage change was less than or equal to zero for at least one publisher’s sets of journals for each discovery system.’
The researchers now plan to look at the effects on the results of factors such as aggregator full text availability, size of publisher, journal subject, overall usage trends and configuration options in the discovery services. They also hope to widen the group of libraries studied and look for explanations for the changes in usage observed. Such studies provide a snapshot of the ways the information discovery is changing as research behaviours and technologies change. Whichever way libraries choose to proceed in helping their users to find relevant information for their research, the knowledge-seeking behaviour of Guilhem Chalancon and many researchers like him will be – and should be – hard to ignore.
FURTHER INFORMATION Library of Congress BibFrame
www.uksg.org/researchstudy
Levine-Clark and McDonald slides from UKSG
www.slideshare.net/MichaelLevineClark/niso-dda- uksg-2014-33587193
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
Procter Photography
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