** Cross-posting on ALCTS-COLLDV, SERIALST, and CODE4LIB, hoping to catch 
different audiences **

Dear colleagues,

We are experimenting with the setup of non-catalog (i.e., central index) 
results in our discovery service and would like to know what other libraries 
have done with regard to some aspects of such setup:

First, have you been comprehensive or selective with the resources indexed? In 
other words, do you treat it as a search across (almost) all your resources, or 
as a quick search that offers some useful results across most disciplines but 
doesn't intend to be comprehensive

Second, have you included large quantities of non-full-text resources? That is, 
if you have the option in your discovery system to include indexing from 
something like PsycINFO or Scopus, do you include it? If so, do you include 
many of these, or only, say, one large one? (I understand that almost all 
databases have some records where the full text is not immediately attached, 
but this is quite different from a non-full-text database.)

Third, have you deliberately and specifically included Open Access resources in 
your discovery service? These might be through "standard" collections such as 
from the DOAJ, HathiTrust, Digital Commons, or arXiv, or they might be through 
a la carte collections as packaged by your discovery-service provider.

With all this, I am also very interested in whether you have specific data to 
justify your decisions or whether they were made more on the basis of 
principle. (Then of course there such issues as how you brand it on your 
website, how you contextualize the different search options, and whether and 
how you teach the tool, but I have to stop somewhere.)

I've struggled to find literature on the content libraries include in their 
discovery services. Quick answers are better than none. Thanks for any help you 
can give.


Robert Heaton
Collection Management Librarian
Utah State University Libraries

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