On Discovery Services and Search, Thus Said Stephen Abram

Stephen Abram

An important post from Dave Pattern about discovery services and search. I especially like the focus on looking at your analytics and taking them to the next level (for example cost per use of digital resources declining a lot and the ratio of physical to digital format access)... Read: Dave Pattern's Relevancy Rules

Dave Pattern says: 

OK, so why am I ranting on about all this stuff? It's simply because I've been pulling out some usage stats from our Summon instance…

• The library's print collection accounts for just 0.3% of the items, but accounts for 10.3% of the result clicks — I think our users are trying to tell us that they think our OPAC sucks and they'd rather use Summon to search for books
• 89% of the results clicked on appeared on the first page of results — as with Google, users rarely delve any further the page 1 of the results
• Only 2% of result clicks came from beyond the 4th page of the results — very few users will explore the long tail of results
• 50.5% of result clicks were for the first 4 results on page 1 — the majority of users won't even bother to scroll down the page!
• 72.3% of searches used 3 keywords or less — students are using their Google skills
• Since launching Summon, we've seen increases of 300% to 1000% in the COUNTER full-text download stats for many of the journal platforms we subscribe to — although "cost per use" can be a crude measure, we're getting much better value out of our e-resource subscriptions now.  Continue reading: Relevancy Rules in Self-plagiarism is style, Dave Pattern's blog 

On the same shelf (Discovery Services aka Federated Search):

• "For those unfamiliar with Summon  or web scale discovery services, many web scale discovery services will show items from the catalogue in the discovery search, but clicking on the result will bring you to the classic catalogue (web opac)." A survey of Library Virtual Shelves - 8 examples  
• The Ins and Outs of Evaluating Web-Scale Discovery Services   
• Discovering What Works: Librarians Compare Discovery Interface ...
• Articles on Discovery - Unified Resource Discovery Comparison
• Library Discovery Services – A Better Way to Find What You're ...
• The Truth About Federated Searching
• A Universal / Global Search Engine Remains an Elusive Target  

• Federated Search - Reading now

• Federated Search - What's in a name?