"I’ve long argued that librarianship on top of digital information is about the authority/authenticity/appropriateness of the information provided to the user, as opposed to the overwhelming amounts of information available via other search tools that don’t provide that differentiation. In order to meet those tests, one thing that is clear is that libraries and librarians should never cede control to other organizations over the content they offer to their end-users. It doesn’t matter if that happens because the content providers fail to provide access via federated search, or whether the library has allowed third party organizations to determine what content they can access via a local index discovery tool. Ceding this control cripples the ability of a library to build unique and precise informational offerings that target the needs of their end-users." - Peter Murray

That control is long gone. I think people do care about authority, but IMO, that will come from outside the library community, at least on the technology side - Deepak Singh

Do you really think we have ceded control? I think we still have it; we just don't market it as an asset to the user like we should/could. It is "the discovery layer problem" that we are all trying to tackle. My take on it is that we should put all of the information we can into a unified index with a user interface as simple as Google but with the added advantage of improving relevance of results via fielded data and librarian vetting for authority/authenticity/appropriateness. - Peter Murray

@Peter I think to some extent it doesn't matter if we've ceded control or not - we've been having this discussion/argument at my office - the tech architects' side being that, if we want to add value at all, we have to build a discovery layer anyway - which we will expose in many different places, including browser extensions - but once you build it, the cost to also show it as a searchbox on your website is low. In other words, it doesn't matter that "they won't come" - the website is free anyway... - Richard Akerman

... since you need to build the underlying infrastructure if you ever want to have a hope of delivering enhanced services around content and metadata. I also think "search in this box, and discover far more of the millions of dollars of content that we license for you than if you search in THAT box (e.g. google)" has got to be a compelling argument... surely? Researchers, what do you think? - Richard Akerman

Dorothea, I keep hearing that story internally too - "oh won't it will be great when all the publishers are gone and the library can be the Temple of OA". The whole point of OA is that anyone can have it, anywhere. Considering we do a terrible job of helping our users find content that is licensed from a few huge publishers, we're going to do better when content is scattered all over the place? Since it's OA, what's to stop a thousand startups from loading it all on their local harddrives? ... - Richard Akerman

... Doesn't OA just take the problem from libraries (who pay millions of dollars to license content) doing a terrible job even though they have a perfect right to intermediate access, to libraries (who pay nothing for OA content) trying to out do *every other web search engine on the entire web, a battle which we were never in and lost long ago*? OA doesn't make things better, it make them much, much worse for libraries. (and as always, I mean pure special/research libraries, not public libraries or unis) - Richard Akerman

It's a compelling argument, but I haven't seen an implementation that lives up to the promise. Pubmed's "searching pubmed for X will give Y results" message that it shows people arriving there via google search is the closest thing I've seen that actually shows more value in searching using their interface than using Google. Most in-library search functions I've seen(admittedly not many) are woefully bad, but they are probably the third-party things Dorothea is railing about. - Mr. Gunn

@Richard. Thanks for reminding me about how this concept is more than the user interface. I "know" that -- it is the cornerstone of OhioLINK's discovery layer strategy -- but I haven't internalized it in my thinking very well. There is a good discussion here that I think I'm going to try to capture in a blog post so it doesn't get lost. Thanks for the input, everyone! - Peter Murray

@D0r0th34. I think we need to stick with the discovery end of the trade until the context sensitive linking -- e.g., get the user to the appropriate copy -- is better. What I don't want to end up with is giving up on the discovery layer to the point where users aren't coming to content that we have paid for on their behalf. Perhaps that will be the day when everything is open access, but can't hold my breath that long. - Peter Murray