As Researchers Turn to Google, Libraries Navigate the Messy World of Discovery Tools A.J. Mast for The Chronicle By Marc Parry Many professors and students gravitate to Google as a gateway to research. Libraries want to offer them a comparably simple and broad experience for searching academic content. As a result, a major change is under way in how libraries organize information. Instead of bewildering users with a bevy of specialized databases—books here, articles there—many libraries are bulldozing their digital silos. They now offer one-stop search boxes that comb entire collections, Google style. That’s the ideal, anyway. The reality is turning out to be messier. The rise of these "discovery" tools, which mine giant indexes of aggregated content, is generating new tensions. Because some companies that make the search tools are also in the content business, selling article databases and other material to libraries, one fear is that firms could favor their own content in results. Another is that discovery software, by sluicing content together, could deluge users with less-appropriate resources. Either way, they could miss relevant articles.
read more: As Researchers Turn to Google, Libraries Navigate the Messy World of Discovery Tools As Researchers Turn to Google, Libraries Navigate t... Librarians want to make their content searchable, but they’re wary of commercial software that may skew the results. View on chronicle.com Preview by Yahoo STEPHEN B. ALAYON Data Bank Senior Information Assistant Library and Data Banking Services Section Training and Information Division Aquaculture Department (AQD) Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) Tigbauan, Iloilo 5021 Philippines URL: http://www.seafdec.org.ph Telephone No.: 63 33 5119170 to 71 local 409 Fax No.: 63 33 5119174 Mobile Phone No.: 63 919 4506688 Email Add: [email protected], [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Filipino Librarians" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/filipinolibrarians. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
