We usually hear that is not the destination but the journey what is important. Is this also applicable when we talk about Discovery in the context of the scholarly communication?
10 years of discovery services implementation and digital publishing development have altered the library technological scene, users’ expectations, and scholarly communication actor’s interactions. Covid-19 pandemic also highly impacted many areas of the scholarly communication specially delivery and discovery.
This presentation will be of interest to content providers, librarians and service vendors. This presentation will contribute to the understanding of what is Discovery and what content providers can/should do to contribute to the discovery of their own content and per consequence improve the experience of end users.
This presentation will contribute to the understanding of the basics on Discovery but also provide a check list of what content providers should do to excel in this field. From metadata providers to partnerships, content providers have an essential role on Discovery but how much are they responsible of the success of the Discovery users’ journeys? What can they do and why?
Users want library discovery to be precise and intuitive. And solutions on the open web have natural language and contextual semantic search capabilities enabling them to understand users and return lots of information. But many of these tools lack precision. Their results reflect popular searches, but what if a user is looking for something unpopular? What if the user is focused on a very specific aspect of a topic, or researching an unknown relationship between two different topics?
This is where libraries have the advantage. Libraries have rich metadata. Discovery services can look for subject tags. So, discovery users aren’t flooded with irrelevant results that were called up because they share keywords with the query. Instead, the discovery service gets what the user wants.
Users should have the best of both worlds: a semantic search capability that combines natural language with discovery’s subject precision. However, while many institutions and companies are working toward achieving semantic search, there are no true standards and definitions of what semantic search is or should be for academic research.
This panel will discuss the problem’s scope, how the library world is addressing this, and suggest how the research community can come together to craft standards.
NISO Discourse Discussion for this session
https://discourse.niso.org/t/the-state-of-discovery/607
