Hi Robert,

At our library (Raritan Valley Community College in NJ), this work is sort of divided between two of us, and I just started here this semester, so I may not have all the answers in terms of why we made certain decisions.

RVCC migrated to WMS in the summer of 2017, which uses OCLC's Discovery as its OPAC/discovery service. However, we were already using EDS as our discovery service, so Discovery is primarily used as a catalog.

In EDS, we include most of our database content. This includes EBSCO, ProQuest, Gale, and Infobase databases, plus some others from providers like Artstor/JSTOR. However, some of the databases don't seem to work as well. We basically never get an Artstor result when searching in EDS, and I've heard streaming video from AVON doesn't work great either. Some we do not have selected include Films Media Group (Films on Demand I believe). This is because it is not available as a "partner database." Some of the databases we do have selected (ProQuest ones for example) are also not partner databases, so they rely on the link resolver for discovery, and EBSCO's list of what ProQuest has is not always accurate. So, it is intended to be nearly comprehensive, and those that were left out were more for technical reasons than any sort of principle. 

In Discovery, we include just ebook and some streaming video databases, since that's where students are looking for books and movies. 

We have not intentionally included large quantities of non-full-text, just what is included in the databases that also contain full text. However, I just heard from my colleague that in EDS she has the "Complementary Index" turned on, mostly because that's what EBSCO suggested she do. For us, much of what they have indexed is not available in any of the databases we subscribe to.

For OA in EDS, we have DOAJ selected. In Discovery, we have the Open Textbook Library selected. We purposefully chose to only include these because we did not want to overwhelm our students. However, we are considering making a custom search box for faculty in our OER LibGuide that uses Discovery but searches libraries worldwide for OA resources. The "search box generator" is something you can do in Discovery where you can select particular databases or content types as essentially forced facets.

If we ever move away from EDS and use Discovery as a full-fledged discovery service, I'd like to see what it can do in terms of only searching particular groups of databases. For example, creating a custom search box for a Psychology LibGuide that only searches Gale Psychology Collection, Psychology Database, ScienceDirect, Academic Search Premier, etc. based on what we think return the best results.

As far as branding, EDS is "RVOneSearch," and is the only search box available on the library homepage (a LibGuide page). Discovery is available by clicking a large button called "Books & Media" that is basically right next to RVOneSearch. We teach RVOneSearch in Info Lit Instruction for English I and II (although in II we also do more with individual databases I believe). This is primarily because students already have enough difficulty selecting keywords and evaluating results, so we do not want to add another layer to their research process by requiring them to select a relevant database.

Janelle

Janelle M. Bitter, MSLIS, MM
Systems and Technical Services Librarian
Evelyn S. Field Library
Raritan Valley Community College
On campus: x8329 
Off campus: 908-648-8500
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-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Robert Heaton
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2018 5:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] content included in discovery service: comprehensiveness and inclusion of non-full-text and OA resources

** 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