Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
finally has the opportunity to add local holdings information, such as
the library catalogue (including real-time loans information), the
institutional repository, and locally and nationally digitized primary
material. This in turn creates the potential to allow libraries to avoid
duplicating their own lists; for example, if the majority of the library's
e-journal and e-book holdings are directly searchable in the pre-
harvested index, either through full-text availability via publishers'
websites or aggregators, or via OpenURL from databases and
institutional repositories, the need for this information through A-Z
lists and library catalogues is minimal.
Can we really move away from A-Z lists completely? Can the library
catalogue revert to being to a record of the print holdings in the library,
essentially a facet of the union index? There are certainly benefits to the
idea of a union index for resource discovery; however, there is still some
debate as to whether this is the right choice:
The danger with relying on any one service to provide you with access
to its indexed content is that the service's criteria for source selection
may not be yours.
(Lederman, 2009)
However, a counter-argument is that users of federated searching do
not necessarily choose A&I databases either. Indeed as highlighted by
Rochkind (2009) in his reply to the above blog post: 'EVERY SINGLE
content provider does NOT make their content available for federated
search in the first place. Of the approximately 800 licensed databases
we have listed in our collection, only about 300 are federated search-
able. The remainder are largely not there because of lack of
functionality on the content provider's end, not on our fed search
vendor's end.' In fact the recent press release from Serials Solutions
seems to indicate that some content is more readily available to
harvested search than to federated search.
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Indeed, Google does not index everything on the web, but it indexes
a lot. No tool for uncovering academic information is entirely
comprehensive in its coverage. Research at Stockholm University shows
that students were not enthusiastic about Google Scholar or MetaLib;
however, they agreed that Google Scholar was easy to use (Nygren et
al., 2006).
