In today’s academic library world, there are scores if not hundreds of companies offering every possible kind of solution for cataloguing, displaying and making the library’s holdings discoverable. However, some of these are very expensive; and, as Lone Ramy Katberg, Special Adviser to Aalborg University Library and the Royal Danish Library points out, few will work unless publishers prepare carefully first. Here are some tips from Lone on how to make publications more discoverable. They are even more pertinent this week, which is Open Access Week.
Be distinctive
Lone says it is a good idea to choose titles that stand out. Adopting the identical title other publishers have also used – e.g., Economics – will only work if the author is very famous in his or her discipline. Subtitles are sometimes crucial: they are an easy way of directing content expectation. If the title covers some new or unusual ground, creating the right metadata becomes all-important.
Bibliographical descriptors must be accurate, but at the same time not “drown in detail”; e.g., Life in Cyberspace – is it about social media, cybercrime, psychology?
Think in buzzwords
Crafting the correct metadata to underpin a snazzy or challenging title is key. The short description or blurb, especially its first two lines, is also very important. There can’t be too many keywords listed, as long as they are a true reflection of the content.
My Google does not look like your Google
Google uses a lot of knowledge about the user individual when displaying search results. This is information it derives from gmail, bookmarks and interactions. Consequently, the list of articles a user gets from searches differs according to that user’s behaviour. The language used by the searcher also makes a huge difference to the search results.
Google is easy, but is it enough?
Libraries have gone full circle in their approach to Google. At first, librarians discouraged students and
academics from using it; after some years, they realised that, in order to
achieve maximum discoverability, their holdings had to appear on Google. But is Google enough? No, it is not… Google fathomed this quite
early on and introduced Google Scholar to the market.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar was launched in 2004. If you feed “Dolly” into the
Google search engine, you come up with information about a sheep and not a
country-and-western singer: from the outset, academia was and still is its
focus. But what is included in it and what is not is still a big issue. It is by no means comprehensive.
Library systems and workflows
In an academic library setting there are two ways of being found.
- Via a link resolver which discovers via basic metadata – title, author and ISBN.
- By direct indexing, where you let your content be indexed by the provider.
If a publisher does not use link resolvers, although the publications may be indexed in Google Scholar, Web of Science, and so on, libraries can’t connect the reference to the content if no direct URL is provided. Addressing this issue is especially important for publishers wishing to make Open Access content discoverable, because otherwise libraries can’t switch on access and display the content as available.
Direct linking/indexing
There are several off-the-shelf discovery systems now
available. Each has its drawbacks: in
some, the hierarchy of display order seems illogical, some are difficult for
consortia to use, some seem to favour certain publishers over others. In addition, these are add-ons and not
necessarily an integrated part of the library system environment. Nevertheless, unless publishers are brave
enough and have sufficient resources to take on a great deal of discovery work
themselves, working with third party discovery system providers may at present
be the only practical way forward to maximise discovery.
Gold Leaf 