Speakers: George Machovec –Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries; Rebecca Lenzini –The Charleston Company; Dennis Brunning - Arizona State University; Ronda Rowe - University of Texas at Austin; Martha Whittaker – George Washington University Libraries; Amanda Price – Mississippi State University Summon (Serials Solutions), EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), OCLC WorldCat Local, Encore Synergy (III) and PrimoCentral (ExLibris) all represent a new class of discovery systems for libraries. Based on the success of Google Scholar, each of these solutions combines journal literature, MARC record data and digital repository metadata under a single umbrella. This program will bring together librarians to discuss what they are doing in regard to enhancing their next generation interface. This program will look at how different services have been integrated and used at local libraries. What differentiates these offerings and what solution(s) might work best for your library?

1. A COMPARATIVE OVERVIEW OF JOURNAL
DISCOVERY SYSTEMS
CHARLESTON PRECONFERENCE
George Machovec
Associate Director
Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries
November 3, 2010

2. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
 Paper based indexing/abstracting services
 1864 - Zoological Record
 1876 – Need for more and improved periodical indexes
discussed at first ALA convention
 1879 – Index Medicus, with hiatus in early years
 1890 – H.W. Wilson produces “Readers Guide to
Periodical Literature” followed by subject specific guides
in early 1900s
 1907 – Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS)
 20th century saw explosion of subject specific
indexing/abstracting services

3. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
 1960s saw first computer aided retrieval with
systems like Index Medicus and STAR/NASA
 1970s saw the first commercial timesharing
systems such as Dialog, Systems Development
Corporation (SDC) and BRS
 Late 1980s saw move away for centralized
timesharing systems
 CD-ROM
 Local loading (e.g. 1987 Wilson databases loaded on
CARL system at Arizona State University)

4. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
 1990s – Modern day Web introduced (1993) and
move away from local loading/CD-ROM in late
1990s
 2000s – Proliferation of online services
 Early/Mid-2000s Growth of metasearch/federated
search solutions

5. MANY PROBLEMS WITH METASEARCH ONLY
 Slow response from servers
 De-duplicating/selecting citations
 Limited number of targets or results bog-down
 Many query protocols
 Z39.50, customized http queries, XML gateways
 Inability to do true relevance ranking and facets
with only limited results returned

6. GOOGLE SCHOLAR
 Alex Verstak and Anurag Acharya began looking at
a consolidated super index
 Beta launch in November 2004 – still has a “beta”
designation in 2010!
 A separate search island from the main Google
index with some overlap

7. GOOGLE SCHOLAR
 Additions to GS over the last few years have
included
 “Cited by” feature which mimics ISI citation indexing but
uses Web citing instead
 Related articles
 Interaction with local link resolvers through proactively
sending holdings via an XML file
 Citation exporting feature
 Incorporation of some Google Books content
 Links to open access and publisher pay-per-view
 Patents are now included
 Who knows what will come out of the mind of Google
next!
 Oh yes, and its FREE

8. AND THE PROBLEM IS ---
 Nobody knows exactly what is in Google Scholar
 Nobody knows the overlap between Google,
Google Scholar, Google Books and the other
Google islands
 Linking to your local resolver can be very sloppy
and you only see the link to what you own
 It’s not branded
 More local integration and control
An opening 

9. LIBRARY DISCOVERY INTERFACES
 Began with a focus on the traditional OPAC
 AquaBrowser
 Encore
 Primo
 Indigo
 VuFind (open source)
 OCLC WorldCat Local
 Build your own (Lucene, SOLR)
 etc, etc etc
 After a couple of years a quick realization that we
also need a solution for journal literature

10. COMMON DISCOVERY INTERFACES THAT
INCLUDE JOURNAL LITERATURE
 Summon (SerialsSolutions)
 EBSCO Discovery Service (EDC)
 WorldCat Local (OCLC)
 Primo/PrimoCentral (Ex Libris)
 Encore/Encore Synergy (Innovative Interfaces)

11. SUMMON - STRENGTHS
 The biggest pile of stuff – >520 million citations, 6200
publishers, OA, A&I, gov docs, some aggregators
 Pre-indexed all under one umbrella (most like GS)
 Supports OAI harvesting
 Supports MARC records from you local catalog
 Works through your local link resolver
 Live 2009 with >100 customers with many ARLs
 Google speed 80% searches < 1 second
 Tailored to your exact holdings through SerialsSolutions
knowledgebase
 API available in addition to out-of-the-box UI, mobile UI

12. SUMMON - WEAKNESSES
 Expensive
 Must maintain all subscriptions to include within
your scoped instance
 Missing EBSCO, JSTOR, Elsevier, specialty
databases
 Some metadata is thin (but trying to build
composite fuller records)
 Facets and limits optimized for journals with
monographs and other formats of secondary nature
 Summon views no metasearch add-ons as a
strength but others view it as being trapped

13. EBSCO EDS - STRENGTHS
 Live in 2010
 Complete coverage of 300+ EBSCO products,
Lexis/Nexis, JSTOR, Scopus, WoS, Readex, NetLibrary
 Pricing FTE-based but less than Summon in the $18K-
$70K/year
 Direction linking to FT content in EBSCO and uses link
resolver for outside content
 Full-text searching of EBSCO content
 Simple and advanced searching similar to other EBSCO
products
 Can OAI harvest, branded, can load MARC records with
real-time availability status from OPAC, mobile UI

14. EBSCO EDS - WEAKNESSES
 Much smaller central knowledgebase so many
resources must be found in a separate panel via
federated search
 Does not include ProQuest, Gale and many other
aggregations. Most A&I as found on EBSCO only
 Very busy UI results screen but similar to
traditional EBSCOhost
 If you have many non-EBSCO resources most of
your content will not be found in the central results
panel

15. WORLDCAT LOCAL - STRENGTHS
 Building on comprehensive collection of WorldCat
cataloging
 Includes 350M journal citations (FirstSearch,
NetLibrary, JSTOR, 18 EBSCO files, Gale,
HathiTrust, Elsevier, etc)
 Real-time availability for books from local OPAC
 Uses local link resolver
 OAI harvesting, mobile UI
 Reasonably priced which is FTE based $9K-
$25K/year

16. WORLDCAT LOCAL -WEAKNESSES
 Limited branding and interface tuning
 UI looks clunky compared to some of the others.
 Many items will need to be brought in via federated
search
 Problems with known-item searching
 Problems with book reviews showing before the
books themselves
 More attention is needed for relevancy ranking and
display

17. PRIMO/PRIMOCENTRAL - STRENGTHS
 Released in June 2010
 Medium pile of stuff – 250M records; outside
content via MetaLib federated search
 Works well for known-item searching
 Nicely integrated with OPAC
 Works with the bxRecommender service in SFX
 Can scope holdings with GS XML data
 Nice UI with in-situ showing of details using Ajax,
API available

18. PRIMO/PRIMOCENTRAL - WEAKNESSES
 Works best on ExLibris Aleph and Voyager
implementations (works on others but may be extra
work)
 Base Primo pricing is $28K-$100K/year and then
PrimoCentral is a bump of $7K-$15K/above that
 Focus on academic libraries and scholarly material

19. ENCORE/ENCORE SYNERGY - STRENGTHS
 Web services for real-time harvesting provides more up-
to-date content
 Web services is faster than traditional metasearch
protocols
 Can work with any content provider, content neutral
 Link directly and natively to full-text
 Optimized for articles as well as books; local collections
are still important
 Can OAI harvest
 Integration with local system, no extra overhead
 Very reasonably priced (may be no cost if you have
certain other III products)

20. ENCORE/ENCORE SYNERGY - WEAKNESSES
 Although results are super fast they still appear in
separate facets
 Relevancy ranking is done within each facet and
there is not a screen with all results in one
consolidated panel
 If you have a large number of databases the
separate facets may be a problem
 Limited to databases that support Web services
and other databases must be brought in with
Research Pro via traditional metasearching

21. MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL
 Aside from what each vendor tells you, there is no
single answer for all libraries
 What kind of library are you?
 Academic, public, special
 What is your emphasis?
 STM, humanities, social sciences, popular materials
 Is your local collection still important or is journal
literature and other information more central to your
mission

22. MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL
 How price sensitive are you? Pricing may vary due
to local situations
 If you have no extra money use Google Scholar
 Encore Synergy is very reasonable if you already use
Encore
 EBSCO EDS is mid-range
 Primo is rather expensive although PrimoCentral is only
a modest bump
 Summon generally is the most expensive

23. MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL
 Are you heavily invested in one vendor or a small
group of providers?
 If you are heavily into EBSCO products then EDS or
Encore Synergy may make sense.
 EDS is a poor solution of if you get many non-EBSCO
eResources
 Summon tries to say they don’t need EBSCO databases
because they have the content otherwise but it’s just
their excuse because they don’t have it
 Pay close attention to what will be under the single
index umbrella and what must be federated

24. MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL
 What is your gut reaction to the UI, curbside appeal
 Keeping good relations with your key vendors
 Do you have local expertise to play with an API or
are you happy with the vendor supplying a more
complete solution
 Do you want/need more than one discovery later?
 Do you need one at all?