Digital library and discovery tools: the case OneSearch and University of Siena

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the development of modern bibliographic research tools, with a focus on discovery tools. In the first part it analyzes the evolution of the online catalog: being the main intermediary between the library and the outside world, the online catalog has been at the center of the professional debate since the late Seventies, when first generation OPACs were developed. The advent of the Internet brought to light several critical issues related with traditional catalogs, especially their inability to respond to the users' emerging needs: as a consequence, Web search engines started to become a major search and retrieval tool of documentary sources too. This led to the birth of two new instruments: next generation catalogs and discovery tools, new generation and web-based catalogs showing many similarities with to the most popular Web search engines. The second part of the paper shows the results of a qualitative analysis conducted on 116 users of the Library "Circolo Giuridico" of the University of Siena, in order to investigate their approach with OneSearch, the new library platform adopted by Tuscan universities.