Discovery Summit 2013

The opportunities

Discovery of resources for research and teaching is an area of almost continual upheaval and presents many challenges for libraries, museums, archives and other cultural and educational institutions. It is an area that is essential to engage in as effective resource discovery services are important for the student and research experience and for ensuring that our valuable and unique collections are accessible as widely as possible. There are also opportunities to be seized to make systems and processes more efficient.

The future

Some groundbreaking experiments and initiatives offer the promise of fresh and sustainable approaches to resource discovery. For example the British Library and Harvard experiments with open bibliographic metadata, Europeana and Digital New Zealand’s technical approach; the vision offered by the Digital Public Library of America and JISC’s Discovery programme.

Is open enough?

These approaches are not without challenges. Many people have been successful in releasing open data but there are issues that need to be addressed to ensure that data is used to improve resource discovery. We need to ensure that data is easy to use by addressing the technical, quality, legal, economic and social challenges that are emerging.