What’s a "discovery layer"?

For a long time in the Libraries we've had a problem with our catalogue: there are two of them. Or three or four or more, depending on how you look at it. To explain: all of the books, CDs, DVDs, journals and more are in the main catalogue. All of the eResources (which includes everything online) are in a different listing of just eResources. If you are looking for something, you have to look in both places to be certain we have it.

It's confusing, it's complicated, and it makes it harder for people to find what they need. On top of that, other content like the YorkSpace digital repository and York Digital Journals are somewhere else entirely.

We decided we needed a "next-generation catalogue" or "discovery layer" — something that would bring these silos of information into one place so that they can all be searched at one time, and that would give people the easy searching they find elsewhere on the web. Something powerful, easy to use, and that we can build on for the future.

We chose VuFind

In 2008 we began to look at discovery layer applications. In our plans we decided that "the purpose of implementing a Search and Discovery interface is to provide a more intuitive, robust, and enriched search environment that encompasses more, if not all, of the libraries' extensive collections. The goal is to make searching for information less complicated and closer to what students experience when using Internet search engines and Internet resources".

Early in 2009 we chose VuFind.

VuFind has many things in its favour:

• It gives us just one place to search: no more silos of information. Everything in our catalogue, our eResources list, YorkSpace, and York Digital Journals is all searchable at once. We can add more sources as we want, whether they belong to York or are external.

• We have total control over it, on the front end and behind the scenes: the interface look and feel, its integration with the rest of our web sites, the relevancy rankings, and much more.

• The search engine is more powerful: it's built on the best open source search tool available.

• It’s got lots of new features.  Some examples: book covers and the ability to save things to “My List” (with comments and tags) when you want to note down a book or something else you'll come back to later.

• It is free and open source software that fits with our other beliefs about openness: open access, open data, Open Doors, Open Minds.

It's different

The new VuFind system is different from the classic catalogue, and both the old catalogue and the new one each have their strengths. For this reason, the classic catalogue will still be available as an option even after the launch of VuFind. A couple of things to note about VuFind:

• There is currently no great way to construct a complex search. To do a really complex search you may be better off using Keyword Search in the classic catalogue.
• The search results are not as precise when you are searching for specific authors or titles.  If you want to see all of the books by Freud you will get everything by him, but you may get some other things too.
• There is no way to do a "left-anchored" search, where all the results start with the words you entered. For that you'll also have to go back to the classic catalogue and the Browse Search.

But there is progress on these issues. Work on the complex search is already underway, and we expect that in time, the authority control problem will be solved. And even though there's no exact title search, if you search for a given title it should come up at the top of the results list. The the idea is that the other results further down will be related, and might still be of interest.

January launch

We'll be busy through to the end of this calendar year making changes. Shortly, the interface will look very different, and in January the main search area of the library home page will be using the new system.

The new system has been in a public beta version since September: we opened it up to the community while we were still working on it. This meant that we were able to benefit from many useful comments, suggestions, and bug reports, and we have a much better idea of how the application will perform when it's under heavy use.

We also did usability testing on students and faculty to find out how well the new search worked and where the problems lay. We made many changes based on what we learned, and we'll continue working on it into 2010.

If you have comments or questions please e-mail vufind@yorku.ca or use the vertical Feedback button on the side of every page of the new library website.

More to read

After Losing Users in Catalogs, Libraries Find Better Search Software, from The Chronicle of Higher Education in September 2009, does a great job of explaining the problems with searching in libraries right now, and how discovery layers are making things better.

--William Denton, Web Librarian