Metadata Madness

Over the last year my library has been working on implementing a discovery product for our community hospitals’ website and it has been quite an adventure. We wanted to create a better website to help unlock the siloed information that our library subscribes to. Library users have no clue that Hurst’s the Heart, is only available electronically via McGraw Hill. They could check the catalog, but they don’t. They go on to the library website and type the title in the search box. Now, as librarians, we know that unless you have a discovery system for that search box, the results come from the content on the library website, not within the resources listed on the website. Hurst’s the Heart is not on the library’s website, it is within the McGraw Hill website. I used this ebook as an example, but the same thing is true with other ebooks from other vendors, ejournals, PubMed articles, etc. People try and search the library’s website like it is Google and expect to get results from PubMed or elsewhere. Librarians have curated and organized their little hearts out trying to make things easily found and navigated on the library website. But library websites seem to be a mystery to users. *Confession* I am a librarian and I am sometimes confused trying to find information on my public library’s site. Like it or not, the users (even savvy ones) expect a Google like experience. In order to provide this type of search and retrieving abil...
Source: The Krafty Librarian - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs