Building Bridges with Logs: Collaborative Conversations about Discovery across Library Departments

The process of implementing a discovery tool can be filled with questions, and even after its implementations, questions about its efficacy and the quality of search results can remain. This article describes an interesting approach used by librarians at Virginia Commonwealth University to evaluate their discovery tool.

According to the article’s abstract:

“This article describes the use of discovery system search logs as a vehicle for encouraging constructive conversations across departments in an academic library. The project focused on bringing together systems and teaching librarians to evaluate the results of anonymized patron searches in order to improve communication across departments, as well as to identify opportunities for improvement to the discovery system itself.”

The authors of the article conclude that, overall, the experience was a positive one for the staff members involved and that it led to some valuable insight into the quality of the search results retrieved by the discovery tool.

Jimmy Ghaphery, Emily Owens, Donna Coghill, Laura Gariepy, Megan Hodge, Thomas McNulty, Erin White. Code4Lib Journal, Issue 32, April 2016, http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/11355