Advancing Discovery at Libraries

Author: Kristy Gjertsen

As the industry sees a shift in the way users search for content, librarians are in a unique position to influence the discovery process. The challenge is to make the content procured, searchable and accessible, so librarians are looking to content providers for help with discovery.

Springer Nature is committed to discoverability and has dedicated staff participating in industry standards organizations, whose goals are to standardize the data and indexing so content is equally and fairly discoverable.

We continually enrich our metadata, which is the gateway to our content, with discoverability and the end user in mind. This includes the addition of GRID and ORCID identifiers, and our work with linked open data and semantic search.

Springer Nature also partners with web-scale discovery services such as EBSCO Discovery Service, Proquest Summon, Ex Libris Primo and OCLC Worldcat to ensure that full text data and metadata are being fully indexed to ensure completeness and discoverability.

To aid librarians further, Springer Nature provides title lists in KBART format for our content. We work closely with link resolvers to update collection information and to create clear targets. We also provide customer-specific holdings data in KBART format - for Springer Nature Link Admins. Springer Nature provides free MARC records for all eBooks through our downloader tool on our website or through OCLC.

As part of our ongoing efforts to support the library community become more active in their own discovery process, Springer Nature’s dedicated account  teams offer toolkits, audits, and guidance to implement discovery services.

More about Discovery: 

Global discovery trends and the library's changing role

To learn more about Springer Nature’s discovery or products, email libraryrelations@springer.com.