(with apologies for cross-posting)
The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI), a volunteer work group within the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), was formed to develop a recommended practice related to the index-based discovery services for libraries. The ODI aims to investigate and improve the ecosystem surrounding these discovery services, with a goal of broader participation of content providers and increased transparency to libraries. The ODI working group was formed in late 2011 and held its first meeting in January 2012.
This fall, the ODI dispatched a survey of librarians, content providers, and discovery service providers to learn more about the current state of satisfaction with these new research tools and to measure the value of various requirements in cross-sector practice. The survey addressed current levels of scholarly metadata delivery / indexing, technical successes / opportunities in these data exchanges, and potential benefits of greater development / distribution of discovery tool usage data. A request to participate in the survey was sent to this mailing list. Many thanks for your input if you participated!
The report from this survey is now available via the NISO ODI page at http://www.niso.org/workrooms/odi/ - please note that the full set of recommendations from the ODI Working Group is still underway and will be available in draft form for comment a few months from now.
Survey findings and analysis are provided in detail in this report, which is organized by type of respondent. Each constituency was posed with a range of 5-15 questions on similar topics, customized to address the specific factors that characterize or impact each sector. It is important to note that not all questions were required for completion of the survey, so some items were left unanswered by some respondents.
Following the survey exercise, the ODI will be tasked with developing recommendations for consideration by the wider NISO community. The conclusion of this survey report outlines those next steps in greater detail. If you are interested in keeping up to date with ODI, please sign up to our Interest mailing list: http://www.niso.org/lists/opendiscovery.
Sincerely,
ODI Working Group