Marshall Breeding presenting on Advancement of Discovery through Openness and Interoperability.
The history of discovery as an introduction. Library website offered a menu of unconnected silos and services (ILS catalogs, articles, open URL link resolvers, etc.). Very fragmented and confusing. There has been a movement toward web-scale or centrally indexed content. These services combine data from a wide range of subscription sources and combine them all in a consolidated index that takes advantage of usage generated data and customer profiles. Putting all of that information into a central index creates problems because of the differences in metadata (article level vs. title level metadata, full text, etc.). There are also technical challenges – there must be some relevancy rating to help the user filter the results.
Breeding expanded the view the include publishers, aggregators, libraries, the library community, and (finally) the discovery service providers. It seems like most views of discovery portray only the library, discovery services, and the content when discussing this ecosystem.
NISO Open Discovery Initiative – an attempt to work through the details to make sure it’s a healthy ecosystem. More information is posted here: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/odi.
How do you extend these services to other areas (Learning Management Systems, Google, etc.) to meet users where they are? Linked data is the larger horizon in the information ecosystem. Move away from library-specific schemes to open systems. [We can ask that of discovery services…but what about our own MARC records?] How will the open access movement change the way resources are discovered in (closed, commercial) systems? Right now, there are no open access discovery indexes…and there are lots of hurdles to building one. There are really no open source alternatives to discovery services.
What is the relationship between discovery services and resource management systems?