Best of Core Forum: The Greatest Obstacle of Discovery: Assessment of Library Discovery Systems

Description: Discovery products providing a single search interface to library collections have become industry standard in large academic libraries since their emergence in the late 2000's.  The process and parameters by which libraries select and evaluate these products is, however, neither standardized nor well represented in the literature.  This presentation begins to fill in gaps by discussing libraries' procurement processes and assessment methods including usability studies, drawn from both the literature and real life.  Presenters proceed by offering insights into how commercial discovery products use more standardized and proven metadata schemas like MARC, gleaned from mapping metadata for implementations of EDS (EBSCO Discovery Services) and Primo (Ex Libris).  It concludes by offering a preview of novel research using metadata to benchmark the precision and relevance of search results from proprietary discovery products, reinforcing the importance of maintaining the integrity and accessibility of legacy metadata.

 This webinar was previously presented in-person as a session at the 2024 Core Forum. We are hosting this webinar, with the session adapted and presented live as a virtual event, to extend its reach.

 Learning Outcomes: 

By the end of the webinar, attendees will be able to:

• What questions they might ask of potential vendors and users about the specifications for a library discovery layer, and what they might need to test in the interfaces themselves including

• Including methods for mapping metadata for display and retrieval

• One SQLite method in Python for benchmarking the precision and recall of a discovery product.

Who Should Attend: Librarians involved with discovery layers and choosing the vendor for the discovery layer.

Anne Pepitone is currently the Head of Integrated Library Systems at the University of Washington. She has been in the Information Technology profession for 20 years in various positions within higher education. She holds an MLIS from Simmons University with an emphasis in I.T. Her work at UW has focused on the administration, user experience, and development of Ex Libris’ Alma/Primo systems. She has presented widely on the topics of Discovery Systems and User Experience, totaling 45 presentations over nine years.

Rich Wisneski is the electronic resources librarian at Miami University. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Michigan State University, and M.L.I.S. from Kent State University. His current research interests include user experience in libraries, discovery layer architecture, and analyzing rubrics for assessing electronic resource usage and ROI.

Emily Fidelman is currently the Head of Metadata Services at West Virginia University. She has been serving large public Universities including the University of Colorado, University of Alaska, and University of North Carolina in areas related to discovery for just shy of 25 years, with particular attention to the effect of the open access movement on the metadata ecosystem.

Tech Requirements

Core Webinars are held in Zoom. Speakers or a headset for listening to the presentation are required. You may interact with the presenter and ask questions through text-based chat. Closed captioning is available in the Zoom platform. The webcast will be recorded and the link to the recording shared with registrants shortly after the live event.