** Cross-posting on ALCTS-COLLDV, SERIALST, and CODE4LIB, hoping to catch different audiences **

Dear colleagues,

We are experimenting with the setup of non-catalog (i.e., central index) results in our discovery service and would like to know what other libraries have done with regard to some aspects of such setup:

First, have you been comprehensive or selective with the resources indexed? In other words, do you treat it as a search across (almost) all your resources, or as a quick search that offers some useful results across most disciplines but doesn't intend to be comprehensive

Second, have you included large quantities of non-full-text resources? That is, if you have the option in your discovery system to include indexing from something like PsycINFO or Scopus, do you include it? If so, do you include many of these, or only, say, one large one? (I understand that almost all databases have some records where the full text is not immediately attached, but this is quite different from a non-full-text database.)

Third, have you deliberately and specifically included Open Access resources in your discovery service? These might be through "standard" collections such as from the DOAJ, HathiTrust, Digital Commons, or arXiv, or they might be through a la carte collections as packaged by your discovery-service provider.

With all this, I am also very interested in whether you have specific data to justify your decisions or whether they were made more on the basis of principle. (Then of course there such issues as how you brand it on your website, how you contextualize the different search options, and whether and how you teach the tool, but I have to stop somewhere.)

I've struggled to find literature on the content libraries include in their discovery services. Quick answers are better than none. Thanks for any help you can give.


Robert Heaton
Collection Management Librarian
Utah State University Libraries