Exploring Discovery: The Front Door to Your Library's Licensed and Digitized Content

We're in a new age of Discovery. Not of the physical world but rather one that serves up appropriate resources for your library's researchers, thanks to advancements in handling metadata, natural language processing, and keyword searching. For you, Discovery might be shorthand for single-index products such as Serials' Solutions Summon, EBSCO Discovery, and OCLC's WorldCat Discovery. Yet even those tools require adjustments to meet your institution's specific needs. With first-hand profiles of 19 library projects, Varnum and his roster of contributors offer guidance on the complete range of discovery services, from the broad sweep of vendors' products to the fine points of specialized holdings. Topics include: migrating from a traditional ILS to a library services platform; creating a task list for usability testing of discovery; managing internal development requirements within the constraints of a small or mid-sized library; applying agile software methodology to a Blacklight implementation; real-world examples of usability testing, including a small liberal arts college's implementation of VuFind; meeting the challenge of three different metadata formats; practices in the Primo community for integrating open access content into the front end; serving mobile users with an app and responsive Web design; analyzing the use of facets in search; using a single discovery tool across a library, museum, and archive; and implementing discovery with geospatial datasets. Easy to dip into as needed, this comprehensive examination of discovery services will prove invaluable to IT, web development, electronic resource management, and technical services staff.

Kenneth J. Varnum is senior program manager for discovery, delivery, and learning analytics at the University of Michigan Library. In this role, he is responsible for the library's discovery interfaces (the MLibrary single search tool, ArticlesPlus, Search Tools, etc.), link resolution and content delivery interfaces, and the library's evolving and emerging learning analytics infrastructure. Over his two decades working with public-facing technology in academic, corporate, and special libraries, he has gained a deep appreciation and understanding of the need to tailor systems and interfaces to the local user base. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, he wrote Drupal in Libraries (2012), and edited The Top Technologies Every Librarian Needs to Know: A LITA Guide (2014) and Lorcan Dempsey's The Network Reshapes the Library (2014).