As with any new technology, the market is tasked with identifying the lenses through which to evaluate it’s benefits. With Discovery Solutions, given that a solution is a response to a problem, which problems are discovery solutions designed to solve?

1. Out-of-date user experience

Since Google has changed the way the world discovers content on the web with its minimalist one-step search functionality, libraries face an uphill battle to persuade students and researchers to utilize an out-of-date user experience to find scholarly material, and are becoming increasingly less important during the users’ search process.

2. Unmanageable querying

What used to be a luxury for querying is now the standard. Running multiple queries in multiple databases has become an nagging inconvenience for users. The demand for aggregated content from a variety of sources is becoming increasingly popular as the world-leading web services continue to set the standard.

3. Lack of Coverage

It’s widely known that Discovery Solutions must cover a wide variety of content repositories in order to provide a minimum acceptable experience for today’s user. In 2010, it’s rare to find one that doesn’t meet this baseline requirement – because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t have lasted long enough for us to hear about.

4. Poor Quality

Under the “unacceptable” category for most students, researchers, faculty and library staff is the unscholarly content. The need to find scholarly content can’t be compromised, and any discovery solution should enable library staff to influence the quality of results based on their wealth of expertise – thus combating this issue.

5. Inability to Influence Rank

“Your resources are valuable. And if you’re like every other library, you’ve poured decades of time and resources into maintaining the quality of your institution’s content. When aggregating multiple repositories into one, the ration of remote content to local content becomes very skewed, very fast. A good Discovery Solution would allow your team to control how prominent your treasured resources are amongst the ocean of content being harvested.

6. Endangerment of local resources

“Both anecdotal and statistical data show that search engine users rarely go past the first 2-3 pages of search results. If your staff is unable to influence what users see amongst the 600M search results, the institution’s local resources run the risk of becoming less and less important.”

7. Redundancy of content/content overlap

A major point of frustration during a user’s search occurs when the same source begins to show up from different sources. Created to alleviate this problem, Discovery Solutions should include functionality to resolve duplicate links, and prioritize the resources that your library has access to.

8. Too much time spent during searches

Researchers don’t utilize the library for the sake of utilizing the library. Instead, they utilize the library to access quality content in the shortest amount of time possible in order to get back on with their busy lives. Discovery Solutions should save users time where possible – not make an already lengthy process longer.

9. Users searching in a silo

For decades, students and researchers were forced to conduct research on their own, despite the fact that hundreds of people have performed the same queries around the world and over time. Discovery Solutions should leverage the data that other researchers like them generated. When this is done, search time is cut into a fraction, and your library systems become smarter by the minute.

10. Flexibility/options after the discovery is made

Too many articles are viewed where the primary source of that article is buried behind several links, making the discovery unnecessarily confusing.

Since Discovery Solutions are implemented to solve a variety of problems (of which content coverage is only one) it’s important to consider the full gamut during your evaluation process.