New Discovery Services and Library Bibliographic Control

To improve resource discovery and retrieval, libraries have implemented new discovery services, such as next generation catalogues, federated search, and Web-scale discovery, in addition to their traditional integrated library systems. These new discovery services greatly improve the user experience by utilizing existing cataloguing records housed within the library system or in combination with metadata from other sources, both in and outside of libraries. However, to maximize the functionality of these discovery services, libraries must reexamine current cataloguing practices and the way libraries control the bibliographic description to better serve the user's needs. This report discusses how new discovery services use the cataloguing records and the challenges that libraries encounter in bibliographic control to work with new discovery services, including the quality of cataloguing records, granular levels of bibliographic description, and integration of user-generated metadata into the cataloguing records. Each of these aspects requires further discussion.