As researchers turn to Google, libraries navigate discovery tools – University World News

"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 organise information. Instead of bewildering users with a bevy of specialised 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 favour 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.  Discovery tools have fed a broad and sometimes bitter debate within the library world.  Last year, for example, one library consortium, the Orbis Cascade Alliance, grew so frustrated with the lack of cooperation between two major vendors in the discovery business, Ex Libris Group and Ebsco Information Services, that it issued open letters urging the companies to 'bring this nonsense to an end'.  Promising signs are emerging, however, including Ebsco's recent announcement of a new data-sharing policy that the company calls 'a huge advancement in cooperation' ... The big question is how these emerging tools are influencing research. Scholars have begun several studies to find out ... Levine-Clark and two collaborators – John McDonald of the University of Southern California and Jason Price of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium – have studied how adoption of a discovery tool changes the use of articles from publisher-hosted online journals.  Based on data from 33 libraries and 8,765 journals from six major publishers, their analysis showed 'an overall increase in usage for the entire set of journals in the year after implementation, though the extent of change varied by discovery service and publisher.'  But what are people finding?  That's at the heart of a separate study by Andrew Asher, assessment librarian at Indiana University at Bloomington. Asher, an anthropologist by training, gained notice for previous work on a five-university study of the student research process, which ran from 2008 to 2010 and used ethnographic methods to closely observe students' habits. In 2011, he began a fresh experiment to figure out how undergraduates use the new library search tools and how they stack up against Google ..."