DiscoverLibrary, Vanderbilt University’s online research tool, is now more easily accessible through the Vanderbilt University Web site. Online users can locate an expanding variety of resources by clicking on the DiscoverLibrary search box, which has been added to the Vanderbilt Students and Research Web pages.
“We want users to be able to search DiscoverLibrary at their convenience,” said Jody Combs, assistant university librarian for information technology. “A student or faculty member shouldn’t always need to come to the library’s website to use the library’s resources. We want the library to go to the user.”
Vanderbilt partnered with Ex Libris, a leading vendor of library automation and systems software; the University of Minnesota, and Denmark’s Electronic Research Library to develop Primo, which powers DiscoverLibrary. DiscoverLibrary contains all of the records from Acorn, the library’s current online card catalog, as well as records from the Television News Archive, the library’s largest digital collection.
In recent months the library has added additional new features to DiscoverLibrary and is working to expand the set of digital resources available. These will include the Global Music Archive (an ethnomusicological collection of sound recordings), United States Congressional Serial Set (digitized portions of Senate and House Documents and Reports), Art in the Christian Tradition, (images from the first century to the present) and DiscoverArchive (digital records from the Vanderbilt community).
DiscoverLibrary includes a meta-search component, a service that enables users to simultaneously search across many of the article indexes and databases to which the library subscribes.
DiscoverLibrary already offers personalized services not available in Acorn such as the ability to save and track searches (e-shelf). As DiscoverLibrary develops, Combs said that the library plans to add new web services such as individualized RSS feeds and alerts, a Google desktop gadget, a Facebook application and a DiscoverLibrary toolbar for the desktop.