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Keywords
Discovery Search Tools, EBSCO Discovery Service, Federated Sarching, Primo, Summon
Abstract
Purpose - This review allows librarians to compare three of the major discovery services - EBSCO Discovery Service, Ex Libris' Primo and Serials Solutions' Summon - on the basis of price, content user experience, features and functionality and back-end configuration to make informed decisions about the best tool for their institutions.
Design/methodology/approach - The comparisons were made through a literature review, study of the vendors' websites, several interviews and personal usability testing of each tool.
Findings - The tools each have their strengths and weaknesses, and a decision of which tool is most appropriate for an institution varies depending on the institution's needs and current situation.
Originality/value - A literature review shows that no study has yet been conducted comparing these three discovery tools, and few comparative studies of discovery tools have been published recently.
What is a discovery search tool?
Increasingly, libraries find themselves competing for the attention of students with big search engines such as Google and Google Scholar, and the result is an increased adoption of tools that allow users to search all library resources from a single search point. In the early 2000s, the tool that was used by libraries to compete with Google was the federated search, a single entry point which provided results from many databases. While this solution did look and feel more like a Google search, the relevancy ranking, ability to limit and interface were all less than satisfactory for quality library resource searching. The issue was compounded by the release of Google Scholar in 2004, which provided increased competition with library resource searching (Asher et al., 2013).
The situation changed with the release of the first discovery tool, OCLC's WorldCat Local, in 2007, followed closely by Serials Solutions' Summon in 2009 (Asher et al., 2013). Both EBSCO Discovery Service and Ex Libris' Primo were then released in 2010 (Rowe, 2010). A discovery tool can be defined as "web software that searches journal-article and library-catalog metadata in a unified index and presents search results in a single interface" (Fagan et al., 2012). Unlike a federated search tool, discovery tools import metadata into one central index and apply a single relevancy ranking and search algorithm...