Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Library Guides: An Aggregation Of User Research From 1998 To 2017, David Vess

Libraries

A truly comprehensive search tool for resources provided by libraries will continue to be a distant dream until daunting technical challenges are addressed. A Google-like search experience is desirable in some contexts, but a case can be made that hiding subject-specific article databases behind a comprehensive search tool is a disservice to researchers.

Librarians have a long history of addressing the complex landscape of the various resources they offer by crafting guides to library collections. These guides provide direct links to resources while educating inexperienced researchers about discipline-specific databases. Unfortunately, this solution creates more complexities in the research resource landscape. …