Robert said:

 

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

 

Comprehensive.  As an ARL that supports one of the larger academic research enterprises in the country, we have a heterogeneous user base across disciplines and across research areas (from first-year undergraduates to advanced STEM research).  IMO, if you have a few things in place (good relevancy algorithms, intuitive displays, good collection of citations), I think you can do an OK job of providing decent results across a comprehensive corpus of citations.  One can always do better and there is a certain amount of noise, but as long as known-item search works well for advanced researchers and topical searching works well enough for both advanced and beginning researchers, it’s the best you can do with a discovery system.

 

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.)

 

Yes, because 1) openURL intends to get users to the appropriate fulfillment options whether or not the full-text is available directly from the discovery service; 2) I think it’s better to inform the user of a good source (even if we don’t have the full-text licensed) than to not let them know about it at all.

 

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.

 

Yes.  We have deliberately included OA collections both in support of campus mandates and the by fact that they are typically freely available.  One of the issues we’ve had is that many institutional repositories are not fully open so we generally don’t profile IR’s unless we can confirm they are completely open access. 

 

Hope this helps. 

 

Steve Shadle / Interim Head of Serials Cataloging, University of Washington Libraries                                                             

Box 352900                                                                                                                  shadle@uw.edu

Seattle, WA 98195-2900                                                                                             (206) 685-3983