Academic publisher SAGE has released a new whitepaper 'Improving the Discoverability of Scholarly Content: Academic Library Priorities and Perspectives,' which discusses new ways for members of the scholarly communications supply chain to come together to solve discoverability issues.
Lettie Conrad, Executive Manager of Product Analysis and Elisabeth Leonard, Executive Market Research Manager at SAGE surveyed more than 250 librarians about resource discovery practices and priorities. According to the survey findings librarians considered the highest potential for increasing discovery indexing to be mainstream search engines (Google) and in academic databases (A&I). The library catalogue remains a priority discovery channel for librarians. Discovery issues preventing libraries from purchasing/subscribing to scholarly resources included lack of metadata standards compliance (23%), lack of transparency around discoverability (33%), lack of collaboration (26%) and lack of metadata (33%).
The biggest discoverability challenges are found with audiovisual and multimedia materials.
The paper discusses how content providers can promote discoverability by ‘getting their metadata out there everywhere.’ For example, publishers can participate in open web and library resource discovery and access tools such as search engine indexing, high-quality, timely MARC records, and metadata standards compliance.
Furthermore, the authors recommend that librarians communicate openly and directly with publishers and others in the community about furthering their library priorities.
Those attending the ALA Midwinter Meeting are invited to join Elisabeth for a special in-booth presentation of the white paper results on January 31st at 2pm in the SAGE Booth #4021. The paper is available to read at http://www.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdfs/discoverability2015.pdf.
