A JISC funded study is making recommendations to help people find university research outputs through better integration of library catalogues, research repositories and other university systems.
The JISC-funded ‘Online catalogue and repository interoperability study’ carried out by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde suggests that [our emphasis] although there is overlap between the types of information resources recorded in library catalogues and repositories, these overlaps are rarely apparent to the information seeker. This is because both types of system need to be searched separately as there is no interlinking.
Barriers between systems arise not only for technical reasons but also because they are often based in different departments of the university.
Practical advice for universities looking to make improvements in this area include:
+ Improving co-ordination between the departments responsible for institutional information systems to reduce duplication of effort and increase the efficiency of workflows
+ Making it clear to the information seeker what types of information the library catalogue and the digital repository each cover
+ Describing the same types of resources consistently in the library catalogue and digital repository
+ Improving the consistency and quality of subject descriptors, classification and author naming in digital repositories and using the same standards for these as the library catalogue as far as possible
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