If anyone is interested in the answers I received, here is a summary, based on 7 responses:

 

 

First, have you been comprehensive or selective with the resources indexed?

Five libraries seek to be comprehensive. One that is more selective made an earlier attempt to be comprehensive but found that duplication and unreliable or unnecessary resources confused users. One institution maintains two separate discovery profiles: one that is comprehensive, for advanced researchers, and one that is much more limited, for basic researchers.

 

Second, have you included large quantities of non-full-text resources?

Four libraries include index-only resources. Two smaller colleges limit only to full-text resources. The institution with two separate profiles includes indexes in the comprehensive profile but not in the other.

 

Third, have you deliberately and specifically included Open Access resources in your discovery service?

All 7 libraries include OA resources. Some limit them to specific collections such as the DOAJ or to OER specifically relevant to their curriculum.

 

 

On the whole, the consensus seems to be to provide as much content as can be reliably accessed. If an inexperienced audience is assumed, some libraries reduce the inclusion of non-full-text resources to a minimum. Libraries generally include Open Access resources as long as these can be managed with minimal effort.

 

 

 

 

** Cross-posting on ALCTS-COLLDV, SERIALST, and CODE4LIB, hoping to catch different audiences **

 

Dear colleagues,

 

We are experimenting with the setup of non-catalog (i.e., central index) results in our discovery service and would like to know what other libraries have done with regard to some aspects of such setup:

 

First, have you been comprehensive or selective with the resources indexed? In other words, do you treat it as a search across (almost) all your resources, or as a quick search that offers some useful results across most disciplines but doesn’t intend to be comprehensive

 

Second, have you included large quantities of non-full-text resources? That is, if you have the option in your discovery system to include indexing from something like PsycINFO or Scopus, do you include it? If so, do you include many of these, or only, say, one large one? (I understand that almost all databases have some records where the full text is not immediately attached, but this is quite different from a non-full-text database.)

 

Third, have you deliberately and specifically included Open Access resources in your discovery service? These might be through “standard” collections such as from the DOAJ, HathiTrust, Digital Commons, or arXiv, or they might be through a la carte collections as packaged by your discovery-service provider.

 

With all this, I am also very interested in whether you have specific data to justify your decisions or whether they were made more on the basis of principle. (Then of course there such issues as how you brand it on your website, how you contextualize the different search options, and whether and how you teach the tool, but I have to stop somewhere.)

 

I’ve struggled to find literature on the content libraries include in their discovery services. Quick answers are better than none. Thanks for any help you can give.

 

 

Robert Heaton
Collection Management Librarian
Utah State University Libraries

 

 

To unsubscribe from the SERIALST list, click the following link:
http://listserv.nasig.org/scripts/wa-NASIG.exe?SUBED1=SERIALST&A=1