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This review allows librarians to compare three of the major discovery services – EBSCO Discovery Service, Ex Libris’ Primo and Serials Solutions’ Summon – on the basis of price, content, user experience, features and functionality and back-end configuration to make informed decisions about the best tool for their institutions.

The comparisons were made through a literature review, study of the vendors’ websites, several interviews and personal usability testing of each tool.

The tools each have their strengths and weaknesses, and a decision of which tool is most appropriate for an institution varies depending on the institution’s needs and current situation.

A literature review shows that no study has yet been conducted comparing these three discovery tools, and few comparative studies of discovery tools have been published recently.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and compare open source and proprietary discovery tools and find out how much discovery tools have achieved towards becoming the next generation catalog.

The paper summarizes characteristics of the next generation catalog into a check‐list of 12 features. This list was checked against each of seven open source and ten proprietary discovery tools to determine if those features were present or absent in those tools.

Discovery tools have many next generation catalog features, but only a few can be called real next generation catalogs. Federated searching and relevancy based on circulation statistics are the two areas that both open source and proprietary discovery tools are missing. Open source discovery tools seem to be bolder and more innovative than proprietary tools in embracing advanced features of the next generation catalog. Vendors of discovery tools may need to quicken their steps in catching up.

It is the first evaluation and comparison of open source and proprietary discovery tools on a large scale. It will provide information as to exactly where discovery tools stand in light of the much desired next generation catalog.

This paper aims to determine the current usage of next generation online public access catalogs (OPACs) and discovery tools in academic libraries in the USA and Canada.

Using the same random sample of 260 colleges and universities in the USA and Canada from their original study, the authors revisited each institution's library web page to ascertain whether the OPAC interface(s) offered were the same or different than in their initial data collection. Data was collected and analyzed in October and November 2011.

Discovery tool use has practically doubled in the last two years, from 16 percent to 29 percent. A total of 96 percent of academic libraries using discovery tools still provide access to their legacy catalog. The percentage of institutions using ILS OPACs with faceted navigation has increased from 2 percent to 4 percent. Combining the use of discovery tools and faceted OPACs, at least 33 percent of academic libraries are now using a faceted interface. Discovery tools that aim to be the “single point of entry for all library resources” are the most recently popular.

About 16 percent of the institutions (n=43) in the sample either did not have web sites or did not provide access to their online catalogs. Thus, some data might be underreported.

The findings identify trends that may inform academic libraries in the quest to providing next generation interfaces to their varied resources.

This study gives a timely update of next generation catalog (NGC) and discovery tool usage in academic libraries in the USA and Canada.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the emergence of resource discovery systems and services along with their advantages and best practices including current landscapes. It reports the development of a resource discovery system by using the “VuFind” software and describes other technological tools, software, standards and protocols required for the development of the prototype.

This paper describes the process of integrating VuFind (resource discovery tool) with Koha (integrated library system), DSpace (repository software) and Apache Tika (as full-text extractor for full-text searching), etc.

The proposed model performs like other existing commercial and open source Web-scale resource discovery systems and is capable of harvesting resources from different subscribed or external sources replacing a library’s OPAC.

This discovery system is an important add-on to designing a one-stop access in place of the existing retrieval silos in libraries. This system is capable of indexing a variety of content within and beyond library collections. This work may help library professionals and administrators in designing their discovery system, as well as vendors to improve their products, to provide different library-friendly services.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the paradigm shift of library automation to resource discovery by exploring the applications of resource discovery. The present status of India on adapting resource discovery applications is discussed.

An evaluative method to examine the status quo of India automation and resource discovery scenario is drawn with a related literature review. Moreover, various pertinent global challenges of embracing discovery tools in the digital environment are highlighted.

The growth of the Indian library automation industry is booming. However, library software adaptation, next‐generation catalogue enhancements and community development avenues are dearth, seemingly remote and far from satisfactory.

The paper focuses on the emerging scenario of resource discovery applications with an overview of global challenges.

Discusses some of the problems designers face in building catalogs in large networks and relates them back to the resource discovery problem. Currently many catalogs tend to be built in an ad hoc fashion ‐ which leads to a great variety in the quality of publicly accessible network catalogs. Furthermore, the research surrounding these catalogs tends to focus on narrow technical issues ‐ resulting in difficult‐to‐use catalogs. Addresses this problem by providing a usability framework based on the library science and human computer interaction literature, and demonstrates some of those principles via an example of a prototype. Results are interesting to resource discovery tool developers in that a framework for understanding the general resource discovery problem is provided and some techniques for dealing with those problems are presented.

This paper discusses how University of Maryland University College (UMUC) librarians customized EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to allow for searching across librarian-selected sets of discipline-specific databases. Discipline-specific searching results in a smaller and more relevant set of search results, which can make research more efficient and effective.

This paper describes the collaboration between systems and reference and instruction librarians to develop, test, launch, promote, and assess discipline-specific searching in EDS in support of effective teaching and learning.

Customization of a discovery tool to allow researchers to run searches across pre-selected sets of discipline-specific databases is beneficial to the researchers since it enables them to find a smaller and more relevant set of search results than they would otherwise receive if they searched across all databases available in the discovery tool.

This paper provides detailed instructions regarding customization of EDS to allow for discipline-specific searching and discusses ways in which this enhancement can be brought to researchers' attention during reference and instruction interactions. This paper should be of interest to technical librarians as well as to reference and instruction librarians.

The study described in this paper aims to identify the progress made in the efforts to model current online public access catalogs (OPACs) after the next generation catalog (NGC) in academic libraries in the USA and Canada.

A random sample of 260 colleges and universities was selected from Peterson's Guide to Four‐Year Colleges 2009, an estimated 10 percent of the total population of 2,560 listed academic institutions. A checklist of 12 features of the NGC was used to evaluate the OPACs of the 260 libraries in the sample. The authors took as the OPAC that which the library linked to as its “catalog,” even though some might be more properly considered “discovery tools” or “discovery layers.” Some libraries used more than one OPAC interface simultaneously; in this case, each OPAC was analyzed separately. In the case of several institutions using the same consortial OPAC, only the first instance of the OPAC was analyzed. About 15 percent of the institutions (n=40) in the sample either did not have web sites or did not provide access to their online catalogs. In all, a total of 233 unique instances of OPACs were analyzed. Data were collected from September 2009 through July 2010. The findings can be extrapolated to the population at the 95 percent confidence level with a confidence interval of ±3.

While bits and pieces of the next generation catalog are steadily working themselves into the current catalog, academic libraries still have a long way to go. About 16 percent of the OPACs in the sample did not show any advanced features of the NGC. More than half of the libraries (61 percent) had only one to five advanced features in their OPACs. Many of those with six or more NGC features were discovery tools. Only 3 percent of the OPACs in the sample (n=8) demonstrated seven to ten out of the 12 functionalities of the NGC, and they were instances either of WorldCat Local or Summon. The weak areas were federated searching, relevance based on circulation statistics, and recommendations based on patron transactions.

This is the first and only study on a large scale conducted thus far that evaluates the progress towards the NGC in academic libraries in the USA and Canada. The findings help academic librarians to recognize and pin‐point the weak links in implementing a true next generation catalog.

Numerous research tools exist but their usage among researchers across the different phases of the research cycle of scholarly communication remains unknown. This research aims to address this knowledge gap by mapping the research tools frequently used by global researchers against the various phases of the research cycle of scholarly communication.

This research adopts a descriptive research design and conducts a cross-tabulation of secondary data consisting of 20,663 useable responses in a global survey of research tools for scholarly communication. This research also administered a survey to academic experts to classify the research tools according to traditional, modern, innovative and experimental categories.

This research reveals the six phases of the research cycle (i.e. discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment) and the research tools of scholarly communication frequently used by researchers worldwide in each phase as a whole and by roles, disciplines, regions and career stages. Notably, this research indicates that most of the research tools used by researchers are classified as “modern” and “innovative”.

The original insights herein should be useful for both established and early career researchers to gain and share research insights, as well as policymakers and existing and aspiring service providers who wish to improve the utility and usage of research tools for scholarly communication. Notably, this research represents a seminal endeavor at enhancing a global survey (secondary research) using a follow-up expert survey (primary research), which enabled the organization of research tools for scholarly communication into four refined categories. In doing so, this research contributes finer-grained insights that showcase the importance of keeping up with the advancement of technology through the use of modern, innovative and experimental research tools, thereby highlighting the need to go beyond traditional research tools for scholarly communication.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comparison of a number of business process mining tools currently available in the UK market. An outline of the practice of business process mining is given, along with an analysis of the main techniques developed by academia and commercial entities. This paper also acts as a primer for the acceptance and further use of process mining in industry, suggesting future directions for this practice.

Secondary research has been completed to establish the main commercial business process mining tool vendors for the market. A literature survey has also been undertaken into the latest theoretical techniques being developed in the field of business process mining.

The authors have identified a number of existing commercially available business process mining tools and have listed their capabilities within a comparative analysis table. All commercially available business process mining tools included in this paper are capable of process comparison and at least 40 per cent of the tools claim to deal with noise in process data.

The contribution of this paper is to provide a state‐of‐the‐art review of a number of commercial business process mining tools available within the UK. This paper also presents a summary of the latest research being undertaken in academia in this subject area and future directions for the practice of business process mining.