Introduction: from search to discovery

An area of growing importance and concern that I address in my courses on the organization of information, as well as basic and advanced cataloguing, is the ability of our existing library metadata standards and practices to provide sufficiently robust means to manage the growing assortment of library materials available in public and especially academic libraries, including books, e-books, journal articles (print and digital), special collections, archival collections, videos, music, open access collections and so forth.

The library catalogue has typically and traditionally provided access to only parts of the collections owned by a library system, such as physical collections of books, journals, DVDs, CDs and so forth. The bibliographic records for these collections are typically structured using standard library metadata systems such as the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), controlled vocabularies, normally Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and encoded within the Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) framework. Increasingly, however, particularly in academic libraries, a number of institutional collections may not be indexed in the central library catalogue, and are thus not accessible via a central portal.

Historically, the catalogue has provided access to materials that are bought and processed within the library's system workflow. Materials that are licensed, such as e-books, pass through a different workflow and often have different processing and discovery systems associated with them. Institutionally digitized or born-digital materials have yet other workflows and systems associated with them. Institutional repositories are expanding in scope to include physical collections, digital collections, digital news feeds, course materials and syllabi, images, audio files and so forth (Balnaves, 2013). Traditional library catalogues have struggled to provide an adequate search portal to access these different resources, especially since the bibliographic records can consist of different metadata standards (more about this later).

Let us use a generic university environment to provide an illustration of a typical search environment for academic libraries. The library catalogue can provide a search portal to a number of collections that form part of the library's repository, such as: