Editorial Board Thoughts: Services and User Context in the Era of Webscale Discovery

Early implementations of discovery systems were revolutionary in their ability to bring together metadata from masses of scholarly resources into super indexes but they were also somewhat unsophisticated in that their initial focus was primarily on the aggregation of data. The data is critical, but the debates over vendors' unwillingness to share data have overshadowed other important features and functionality that are important to making discovery systems valuable, especially in the areas of getting users the actual resources that they find, delivering the most relevant results, and being more aware of the full user context not merely their search query. The user context is a multidimensional matrix encompassing: (1) level of experience, (2) comprehensiveness of their research need, (3) type of scholarly materials the user primarily works with, (4) user discipline, and also (S) what physical or virtual location the user is performing their research from. Missing Services and Opportunities A major issue that continues to confound me is the lack of fully integrated request and delivery services that many discovery systems lace Of course, all of them implement full text linking to every online article that they can create a link to, but as the sphere of scholarly data stretches beyond just articles, library print collections and delivery services have continued to be neglected primarily because implementing those services in an intuitively integrated way, beyond the "link to your old OPAC" methodology, remains a complex task. My main concern with this deficit is that there is a significant amount of scholarly material only available in print and to focus primarily on electronic access limits the ability of our users to perform comprehensive research and reduces access to significant resources and services that libraries provide. During the transition from print to online, we need to consider user behaviors and preferences while eBook technology becomes more user-friendly, especially for academic materials which are often difficult to access and use because of clunky digital rights management and distribution models. The most recent Ithaka study on faculty research behaviors noted that 80% of faculty respondents still find it much or somewhat easier to read an entire book in print versus in electronic format. (1) This will change over time as the technology evolves, but it will be quite some time before all written works are available online and researchers often needs access to the long taft of unique resources that support very narrow and niche knowledge areas. Some of the discovery systems have integrated the DLF recommended interoperability standards seamlessly (2) into their interfaces, but some don't provide much more than a link back to the libraries' traditional OPAC interface, often in a completely different user interface that requires the user to make a cognitive shift And even those vendors who do integrate basic ILS functionality don't intuitively integrate other important library services such as localized delivery or interlibrary loan services. For many of our users, particularly faculty and graduate students, their goal is to exhaustively evaluate every useful resource in the pursuit of their research, not only the easiest and quickest to access. In addition to these deficits also lies untapped opportunity. The aggregation of so much bibliographic data in these systems could allow for providers to build more intuitive connections between primary resources and bibliographic records that relate to those resources. One of our librarians recently commented that it would be really valuable if we could connect all of the book reviews in the webscale index to the actual bibliographic record for the book--placing the related information for the book at the primary point of access for the user. Another librarian commented on how valuable it would be to integrate user generated comments about books from worldcat. …