Web-Scale Discovery Services: Principles, Applications, Discovery Tools and Development Hypotheses

Web-Scale Discovery Services: Principles, Applications, Discovery Tools and Development Hypotheses summarizes and presents the state-of-the-art in WSDS. The title promotes a middle-way between finding the best tool for each particular need and the search for the most reliable systems. The title identifies basic theoretical problems and offers practical solutions for librarians. The volume offers a summary of ideas from around the world, giving a new perspective that is backed up by strong theory. Offering a vision for libraries, this book also allows archivists, museum specialists, computer scientists, commercial operators and interested users to deepen their culture and information literacy.

The great number of information sources now available and the changing habits of web users has led to the development of Web Scale Discovery Services (WSDS). The goal of these systems and techniques is to make catalogues, databases, institutional repositories, Open Access archives and other databases searchable and discoverable through a single point of access. The diffusion of systems and connections between data disseminated by libraries and published by other institutions poses a challenge to understanding discovery in the modern library.

• Lays out the state-of-the-art in WSDS for contemporary libraries and institutions
• Presents an innovative take on information retrieval and digital document management
• Grounds thinking on a bibliographic basis, combining academic, practical and commercial aspects
• Offers a perspective on how WSDS and discovery tools are seen and used internationally
• Provides a version of culture and information literacy of relevance to a broad-range of cultural specialists

Roberto Raieli is the Director of the Department of History, Anthropology, Religion, Art and Performing Arts Library at the Sapienza University in Italy. He is also interim Director of the ‘Angelo Monteverdi’ Library for Philological, Linguistic, and Literary Studies at the same institution. He holds a PhD in Bibliographic, Archival and Documental Sciences, and his research interests include information science, digital libraries, information retrieval, documentation, and the semantic web.

Elena Corradini is a translator and a librarian. She is currently a tutor and adjunct teacher for the DILL Digital Library Learning master’s degree, organised by Parma, Tallinn and Oslo Universities. She holds an MA/MSc in International Information Studies from the University of Parma, Italy, and Northumbria University in the UK. She has also held positions as a subject librarian at the Istituto Trentino di Cultura, and as a public librarian at the Municipal Library of Ala in Trento.