Optimizing the discovery experience through dialogue – a community approach

Abstract

While end users feel increasingly comfortable with discovery services, librarians and content providers struggle with the inherent ambiguities. Librarians find it difficult to promote tools that they do not fully understand, while content providers are concerned that they cannot accurately measure the return on their investments. Based on a UKSG webinar, this article aims to propose ways in which librarians and content providers can overcome some of these challenges through analysis and dialogue. The NISO Open Discovery Initiative is working with the community of discovery service vendors, librarians and content providers to make discovery services more transparent and to ‘streamline the process by which information providers, discovery service providers, and librarians work together to better serve libraries and their users’.2