Coordinated Discovery: UW-Madison's approach to building its library discovery platform
This talk will introduce the concept of Coordinated Discovery (CD) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. CD aims to provide a coherent experience across resource types—bibliographic, digital collections, article, etc.—while at the same time optimizing the experience of any one type. Discovery across resource types is coordinated rather than aggregated in the sense that we do not provide a single global search as exemplified by the super-index products, e.g. Primo, Summon, EDS, nor do we aggregate results from difference sources on a single page bento box style. In CD, patrons begin their searches against the index for a single resource type, e.g. digital collections, viewing search result sets and full record or object displays tuned to the features and behaviors of that type. Behind the scenes a suggester service evaluates search parameters and propagates searches using local and vendor APIs to indexes for other appropriate resource types. When results from these sidebar searches satisfy closeness-of-fit rules, we display in “ad space” sidebars links to these possibly interesting resources. Transitions from searching one resource type to another are smoothed by forwarding the search to another resource “bucket”, along the lines of Google’s search interface. This talk will discuss our motivations and philosophy for Coordinated Discovery and the technology and development we have invested in to support it.
