Category: OPACs/Discovery Systems

OCLC Research: Improving Open Access Discovery for Academic Library Users


The research findings shared in this report analyze the efforts made by library staff to make OA publications discoverable and explore user behaviors at seven institutions in the Netherlands. The findings can serve as a catalyst for academic libraries worldwide to engage in meaningful conversations about enhancing OA discoverability given local contexts and user needs.

Key Contributions of the Report:

  1. Provides valuable insights into the measures taken by library staff in the Netherlands to facilitate the discoverability of OA publications.
  2. Highlights library staff’s successful efforts to support user needs and explores opportunities to improve.
  3. Identifies key stakeholders in the OA landscape and provides actionable suggestions for them to maximize the impact of their contributions.

https://tinyurl.com/2m8638y5

| Artificial Intelligence |
| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"Artificial Intelligence and Music Discovery"


Our article seeks to contextualize this new technology within music discovery research by defining the historical underpinnings of artificial intelligence in computer music and music information retrieval. We also identify four areas in librarianship research and practice where applications of this technology should be explored; augmenting library interactions with conversational search, creating tools to assist with metadata clean up and creation, integrating music holdings into commercial discovery systems, and improving music discovery platforms.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10588167.2023.2287924

| Artificial Intelligence and Libraries Bibliography |
Research Data Curation and Management Works | | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"New ALA Report Maps Increasingly Complex Digital Public Library Ecosystem"


According to the report, three key factors have contributed to confusion about the structure of and access to the digital public library ecosystem:

  • Essential terms like "reading," "library use," and "circulation" should be consistently and transparently defined.
  • The impact of current digital licensing terms on authors: midlist, bestselling, and self-published.
  • The role of Big Five publishers in setting licensing terms for public libraries.
  • How Amazon’s dominance in the audiobooks market influences audiobook library access, impacting audiobook authors, publishers, and narrators.
  • Gen Z and millennials borrow extensively from digital collections but are less aware that digital library lending apps are connected to their local library.

https://tinyurl.com/mrxbyv8w

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

Discovery Systems Librarian at Dartmouth College


The Discovery Systems Librarian is responsible for configuring and managing the Library’s main catalog/discovery layer (Ex Libris’s Primo VE). The incumbent will manage a variety of information discovery pathways, and will monitor and report on key analytics for stakeholders throughout the Library. The person in this position will work collaboratively to promote discovery across electronic resource systems, institutional repositories, and archives and special collections systems. They will also work closely with our User Experience Designer to apply UX approaches and best practices to our discovery systems.

https://tinyurl.com/2s46623b

| Digital Library Jobs |
| Library IT Jobs |
| Digital Scholarship |

"Building a Large-Scale Digital Library Search Interface Using the Libraries Online Catalog"


The Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program (KDNP) was born out of the University of Kentucky Libraries’ (UKL) work in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) that began in 2005. In early 2021, a team of specialists at UKL from library systems, digital archives, and metadata management was formed to explore a new approach to searching this content by leveraging the power of the library services platform (Alma) and discovery system (Primo VE) licensed from Ex Libris. The result was the creation of a dedicated Primo VE search interface that would include KDNP content as well as all Kentucky newspapers held on microfilm in the UKL system. This article will describe the journey from the question of whether we could harness the power of Alma and Primo VE to display KDNP content, to the methodology used in creating a new dedicated search interface that can be replicated to create custom search interfaces of your own.

https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/17257

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"Maximizing the Benefits of Open Access: Strategies for Enhancing the Discovery of Open Access Content"

Maria Bonn has published "Maximizing the Benefits of Open Access: Strategies for Enhancing the Discovery 0f Open Access Content" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

To achieve some economies of scale in library acquisition of OA publications, we should leverage the library crown and work the library network. There's no point in libraries all over the world laboriously replicating the same work of evaluation, selection, and acquisition when they have the tools, methods, and community to work in collaboration. Subject specialists might organize themselves in clusters to share the initial work of discovery and establish criteria for evaluation that can be collectively trusted

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Engine Of Innovation: Building the High Performance Catalog"

Will Owen and Sarah C. Michalak have published "Engine Of Innovation: Building the High Performance Catalog" in Information Technology and Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

In our local consortium, the Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN), librarians have deployed the search and faceting services of Endeca to enrich the discovery interfaces. We have gone beyond augmenting the catalog through the addition of MARCIVE records for government documents, by including Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids and selected (and ever-expanding) digital collections that are not easily discoverable through major search engines. We have similarly enhanced services related to the discovery and delivery of items listed in the bibliographic database, including not only common features like the ability to export citations in a variety of formats but also more extensive services such as document delivery, an auto-suggest feature that maximizes use of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and the ability to submit cataloged items to be processed for reserve reading.

Both students and faculty have embraced e-books, and in adding more than a million such titles to the UNC-Chapel Hill catalog we continue to blend discovery and delivery, but now on a very large scale. Coupling catalog records with a metadata service that provides book jackets, tables of contents, and content summaries, cataloging Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data sets, and adding live links to the finding aids for digitized archival and manuscript collections have further enhanced the blended discovery/delivery capacity of the catalog.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Scholarly Output Assessment Activities, SPEC Kit 346

ARL has released Scholarly Output Assessment Activities, SPEC Kit 346 .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This SPEC Kit explores current ARL member library activities that help authors manage their scholarly identities, provide options for creating and disseminating scholarly outputs, offer strategies to enhance discoverability of scholarly outputs, help authors efficiently track scholarly outputs and impact, provide resources and tools to help authors assess their scholarly impact, create publication reports and social network maps for reporting purposes, and offer guidance and training on new trends and tools for reporting of impact. This study covers library assessment services and resources, training, staffing models, partnerships with the parent institution, marketing and publicity, and future trends.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

The Future of Library Resource Discovery

NISO has released The Future of Library Resource Discovery.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The white paper was commissioned by NISO's Discovery to Delivery (D2D) Topic Committee as part of its ongoing examination of areas in the discovery landscape that the information community could potentially standardize. Included in the paper is an overview of the current discovery environment; descriptions of how these technologies, methodologies, and products may be able to adapt to potential future change; and a look beyond current models of discovery to explore possible alternatives, especially those related to linked data.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Discovery Services: A White Paper for the Texas State Library & Archives Commission

The Texas State Library and Archives Commission has released Discovery Services: A White Paper for the Texas State Library & Archives Commission.

Here's an excerpt:

Discussions among libraries that have recently implemented discovery services are likely to result in agreement that implementation was challenging. However, once implemented, librarians are generally happy with their decisions to offer discovery services to their patrons. Based on librarian experiences of both the challenges and rewards of implementing a discovery service, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) contracted with Amigos Library Services to write a white paper that would include basic information concerning discovery services, as well as an overview of the major discovery vendors.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Open Source OPAC: Blacklight 2.5 Released

Blacklight 2.5 has been released.

Here's the announcement:

Here's an excerpt from the FAQ that describes Blacklight:

Blacklight is an open source OPAC (online public access catalog). That means libraries (or anyone else) can use it to allow people to search and browse their collections online. Blacklight uses Solr to index and search, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently, Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MaRC records and several kinds of XML documents, including TEI, EAD, and GDMS. Blacklight was developed at the University of Virginia Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0 license.

Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS): Final Report

JISC has released the Online Catalogue and Repository Interoperability Study (OCRIS): Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The aims and objectives of OCRIS were to:

  • Survey the extent to which repository content is in scope for institutional library OPACs, and the extent to which it is already recorded there;
  • Examine the interoperability of OPAC and repository software for the exchange of metadata and other information;
  • List the various services to institutional managers, researchers, teachers and learners offered respectively by OPACs and repositories;
  • Identify the potential for improvements in the links (e.g. using link resolver technology) from repositories and/or OPACs to other institutional services, such as finance or research administration;
  • Make recommendations for the development of possible further links between library OPACs and institutional repositories, identifying the benefits to relevant stakeholder groups.

XC User Research Preliminary Report

Nancy Fried Foster has self-archived XC User Research Preliminary Report in UR Research.

Here's the abstract:

This report summarizes the objectives, methods, and major software design findings from the data collected in the user research portion of the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project. A full analysis and interpretation of the data is not included here and will be provided at the conclusion of the project. This report includes edited results from the brainstorming sessions and a list of the features that emerged from the analysis of those results.

Open Source OPAC: Blacklight 2.1 Release

The Blacklight 2.1 Release is now available.

Here's an excerpt from the Blacklight Frequently Asked Questions:

Blacklight is an open source OPAC (online public access catalog). That means libraries (or anyone else) can use it to allow people to search and browse their collections online. Blacklight uses Solr to index and search, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently, Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MARC records and several kinds of XML documents, including TEI, EAD, and GDMS. Blacklight was developed at the University of Virginia Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0 license.

DigitalKoans

OCLC Releases Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want

OCLC has released Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want.

Here's an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

  • The end user's experience of the delivery of wanted items is as important, if not more important, than his or her discovery experience.
  • End users rely on and expect enhanced content including summaries/abstracts and tables of contents.
  • An advanced search option (supporting fielded searching) and facets help end users refine searches, navigate, browse and manage large result sets.
  • Important differences exist between the catalog data quality priorities of end users and those who work in libraries.
  • Librarians and library staff, like end users, approach catalogs and catalog data purposefully. End users generally want to find and obtain needed information; librarians and library staff generally have work responsibilities to carry out. The work roles of librarians and staff influence their data quality preferences.
  • Librarians' choice of data quality enhancements reflects their understanding of the importance of accurate, structured data in the catalog.

eXtensible Catalog Webcast Released

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project has released a six-part webcast that describes the software, which is expected to be released by the end of the month.

Here's an excerpt from the project home page that describes it:

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project is working to design and develop a set of open-source applications that will provide libraries with an alternative way to reveal their collections to library users. XC will provide easy access to all resources (both digital and physical collections) across a variety of databases, metadata schemas and standards, and will enable library content to be revealed through other services that libraries may already be using, such as content management systems and learning management systems. XC will also make library collections more web-accessible by revealing them through web search engines.

Now Available: Scriblio 2.7, CMS/OPAC WordPress Plugin

Scriblio 2.7 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from "Scriblio 2.7 Released":

Scriblio is an open source WordPress plugin that adds the ability to search, browse, and create structured data to the popular blog/content management platform. And WordPress adds great ease of use, permalinks, comments/trackbacks/pingbacks, and other social and web-centric features to that structured data. But that’s not news. The news is that Scriblio now has an internal data model that supports much more sophisticated uses. . . Whereas previous versions of Scriblio were mostly just display and social interaction interfaces to data that’s created or managed elsewhere, this new version supports soup to nuts creation and management of collections.

Status Report on UC’s Next Generation Melvyl Pilot Based on WorldCat Local

The California Digital Library has released Next Generation Melvyl Pilot: Update to the University Librarians, November 20, 2008, which describes the progress made in testing OCLC's WorldCat Local as a replacement for the existing Melvyl Catalog.

Here's an excerpt:

In the six months that the Next Generation Melvyl Pilot has been live, we have gathered information on the user experience, identified the strengths and remaining challenges of the system, and compared the pilot with UC’s goals as outlined in the 2005 Bibliographic Services Task Force (BSTF) Report. Users value the breadth of the service, the integration of journal articles, and the ease of use. Users find challenging the lack of Request integration, difficulties in emailing and printing, and problems in accessing materials, all of which are on OCLC’s roadmap for improvements in the coming year. The pilot is meeting many of the goals outlined in the BSTF report and OCLC has demonstrated the ability to make rapid improvements to the system.

Based on these data, we believe that the pilot shows sufficient promise that we should transition the project into a pre-production phase, in which both UC and OCLC will engage in the planning and preparation needed to position us for going to production in mid-2009 if we continue to see successful progress.

Digital Library Federation and 10 Vendors/Developers Reach Accord about ILS Basic Discovery Interfaces

Ten vendors and application developers have agreed to support standard ILS interfaces that will permit integration and interoperability with emerging discovery services. These interfaces will be developed by the Digital Library Federation's ILS-Discovery Interface Committee. The participants are AquaBrowser, BiblioCommons, California Digital Library, Ex Libris, LibLime, OCLC, Polaris Library Systems, SirsiDynix, Talis, and VTLS.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

On March 6, representatives of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), academic libraries, and major library application vendors met in Berkeley, California to discuss a draft recommendation from the DLF for standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

At the meeting, participants agreed to support a set of essential functions through open protocols and technologies by deploying specific recommended standards.

These functions are:

  1. Harvesting. Functions to harvest data records for library collections, both in full, and incrementally based on recent changes. Harvesting options could include either the core bibliographic records, or those records combined with supplementary information (such as holdings or summary circulation data). Both full and differential harvesting options are expected to be supported through an OAI-PMH interface.
  2. Availability. Real-time querying of the availability of a bibliographic (or circulating) item. This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group.
  3. Linking. Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it; for example, by a stable link to a page displaying the item's catalog record and providing links for requests for that item. This functionality will be implemented through a URL template defined for the OPAC as specified by the ILS-DI task group.

Scriblio Final Report: Open Source WordPress-Based Online Catalog and CMS

The Scriblio project, which was partially funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has issued "Scriblio MATC Project Final Report." Scriblio is an open source, WordPress-based online catalog and content management system.

Here's an excerpt from the report:

Open source software may be good for the community, but it succeeds because it solves problems for those who use it. For Plymouth, this is an easy question: compared to commercial offerings now available, Scriblio can be said to have saved the University hundreds of thousands of dollars in acquisition, license and support costs. Further, the staff time necessary to develop and support Scriblio for Plymouth’s use is similar to that necessary to support those commercial alternatives. Because ongoing development is limited to the library-specific features not provided by WordPress, the investment required to maintain the software is expected to remain low and Plymouth is likely to continue using and supporting Scriblio as long as it continues to deliver value and solve problems. . . .

Some features, such as development of a hosted solution based on WordPress MU suitable for representing consortia, OAI input and output (including eXtensible Catalog project-specific OAI features), support for additional ILSs, and OpenSearch (and Z39.50) input and output are outside the strict scope of Plymouth’s needs, but would greatly aid adoption of the software and build the community. Softer features, such as the development of reusable sample content and more discussion of best practices in online library services, would also greatly aid the project. Because a rich and active Scriblio community will lower the development costs for all participants, Plymouth is seeking opportunities to begin development on those features and expand the community.