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Sunday, March 17, 2013

How many of us know about the web scale discovery tools? Do we really need to know about it?
Find a little information about it and how it help researchers in efficient retrieval process and how librarians can help in facilitating such services

Following are the benefits of discovery tools:
It provides-
  • Single Point of Entry to several resources
  • Pre-harvested
  • Centralized Index
  • Vendor neutral
  • Relevancy
  • Robust Features
  • Customizable

World wide majority of the universities are using the discovery tools. Few of them are :  Serials Solutions Summon ( It is being used at MDX Uni); 360 search; OCLCs WorldCat Local; ExLibris' Primo, Aleph, Metalib; VUfind; EBSCO Discovery Services (EDS)  
There are many open source resource discovery tools also available like:
  • Blacklight
  • LibraryFind
  • Scriblio
  • SOPAC
  • VuFind
Commercial Indian products:
  • Knimbus ( It is being used in Delhi University, JNU..)
  • NLP Labs Pvt. Ltd.
If anybody is interested to setup discovery tool in their library needs to see its features just like does it provide:
  • A centralized index—to the article level & full text
  •  Harvested from many sources (not from Google scholar )
  •  Integrated with full text delivery/ Something you license
  •  NOT federated/brokered/broadcast search
  •  Understands library's holdings/rights
  •  Each vendor has agreements with several content suppliers. (Ask... How many ??) ; In addition to this harvest locally held material like catalog and IR.
  • see the content coverage and agreement with publishers.
  • Relevance ranking cannot be compared with Google page rank

  • Copied from miscellaneous sources
An article worth reading: www.ir.inflibnet.ac.in/dxml/bitstream/handle/1944/1697/31.pdf

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