New: UC [California]-eLinks Direct Linking Usability Report
From the Introduction:
In the past, the research process began with two, distinct phases: discovery and access. After determining a topic, a researcher would enter the discovery phase, in which he or she would look through library catalogs and article indices to identify resources that might pertain to his or her research. During this phase, the researcher would sift through records containing resource descriptions, not the resources themselves. Then, after assembling a list of promising records, the researcher would use these records to try to locate the resources in order to evaluate them. The goal of the researcher during this access phase was to get a physical copy of the resource. The Internet and advancements in search engine technology and library information systems have made research easier in some ways and more difficult in others. The change that has the greatest implications for UC-eLinks – and for library services in general – is the collapsing of the discovery and access phases into a single workflow.
The desired end result of this new workflow remains the same, although most researchers now prefer an electronic version of a resource to a physical one. The process still begins with discovery, but once researchers start entering queries into a search engine and getting search results back, they want to be able to immediately evaluate the results. They repeat this searchand- evaluate cycle as many times as needed. Thus, the research workflow has evolved from search-then-evaluate to search-and-evaluate.
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