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Quick guide to resource discovery
A brief outline of resource discovery systems and how they fit together.
What is resource discovery?
It’s how your users find information sources (journals, books, e-books, guidelines, evidence summaries, etc.) and get access to them.
Access can be by:
linking to the resources directly on the web
requesting a copy via your library service
The resources that have links directly to them will be either:
open access and freely available
bought locally by your library service for users in your organisation
bought as part of the national core collection and made available to all NHS organisations and users
What is a resource discovery system?
When we talk about “resource discovery” in this context, we’re usually talking about the tools (or systems) people use to find information resources.
There are several different tools available commercially, but they all do the same sort of thing – they provide a search box for a user to type some keywords into, and then display some results (with links to the full text of resources that are available to them).
Behind the search box there is a set of indexes, databases and lists of holdings which the library staff select, which control what results the user sees when they search, and which of them have links to the full text.
Resource discovery tools complement the other search tools libraries offer, rather than replacing them. They are designed for quick and simple searching, not for the more controlled searching you might carry out in a database such as Medline or CINAHL. They pull together wide ranges of content in a single results list, so they can be popular with users as a more tailored alternative to a Google search.
NHS England has bought a resource discovery tool for the NHS – this is available to anyone who is eligible for an NHS OpenAthens account. Currently, this tool is the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS).
The “front end” or user interface of the NHS’s resource discovery tool is known as the NHS Knowledge and Library Hub (or just “the Hub” for short). The “back end” is called EBSCOadmin, a system which only the library staff have access to.
There are several different systems which are linked together in the background to make the front end as easy to search and navigate as possible. See What are the different components of the hub? for more information.
We talk about “the Hub” - but there are actually 250+ different versions (instances) of it! We’ve set it up this way so that each organisation with a library service that buys resources can have their own Hub instance, tailored for them.
What do I need to do in EBSCOadmin to manage this?
There are a number of things which need to be done in EBSCOadmin, some of which are done centrally for all instances by the Hub service support team, and some of which you will need to do yourself:
Often done centrally by service desk team, but individual library services may make their own choices.
Adding/amending/deleting holdings in HLM
It’s up to each library service to keep their local holdings up to date (the national ones will be done centrally by NHSE). This is the area most in need of regular attention as your collections change.
What is HLM?
It’s a tool within EBSCOadmin to manage your e-journal holdings (and some e-book holdings – see section below).
You can think of EBSCO’s ‘Holdings Libraries Management’ or HLM as the ‘single source of truth’ for all your e-journal holdings.
The information here powers:
all the full text links on your Hub and in bibliographic databases via Ovid, EBSCOHost and Proquest
LibKey; LibKey Nomand; Browzine; Google Scholar
INCDocs
So if you keep your holdings info up to date and correct in HLM, it will also be up to date and correct everywhere else. Incorrect links to full text, due to incorrect holdings, are frustrating for users (and generate time wasting requests via INCDocs).
Where do library management systems (LMS)s fit into all this?
For now, OPACs are a useful reference for ILL purposes, but once we review INCDocs now that we have the Hub, longer term it is unlikely that there will be a need to add e-journals to LMSs. If you have not already catalogued them on there, we would not recommend starting.
HLM also does a better job than an LMS by providing links at the article level, whereas OPAC links do not. From a user perspective, linking at article level via the Hub is more useful than browsing/searching for content in a specific e-journal title on its platform, which is essentially what happens when you click an e-journal link from the OPAC.
Print journals are different, if only because there may be services still using serials management for receipting and managing journal issues. Although print journals are discoverable in the Hub (via ILL request at the article level in results and in Journals A-Z if this has been enabled), for ILL purposes we currently need a way of finding them.
Regional LMSs are integrated into the Hub so that relevant titles from your consortium library collection will come up in the results. Longer term, we may not need separate OPACs if the EBSCO Hub develops to include ‘patron empowerment’, but for now, a link will take the user out to the OPAC for them to reserve books.
E-books
Some e-books are purchased nationally (such as OUP, and some Kortext titles), and there are also some Kortext regional collections. These are all integrated into the Hub.
Where your Library Management System is integrated with the Hub this offers a good means to support the discovery of your locally purchased ebooks regardless of supplier / publisher in a single place.
A project is underway to make ebook level linking easier to use in the Hub for those on the Koha LMS.
De-mystifying Third Iron
Third Iron is a company that we buy an additional set of tools from, which provide an enhanced linking experience for our users:
Browzine
Accessed via the “Browse Journals” link on the Hub or via a direct link, this offers a simple-to-use reading experience for journals. There is an App available but this requires a separate subscription.
(NB: a small number of journals cannot be displayed in Browzine, so occasionally Browzine will redirect you to EBSCO’s Publication Finder tool instead (which is part of the Hub package)).
LibKey
This product provides a seamless link to fulltext, using the data you maintain in HLM. It also includes thousands of open access articles from hybrid journals, which means your users see many more links to full text. Where a login for a journal is required it prompts you to sign in with OpenAthens, and then takes you straight to the article.
LibKey links are automatically added to the Hub as well as the bibliographic databases, PubMed and Google Scholar. We are working to add them elsewhere so you will find them in the references in BMJ Best Practice, for example.
LibKey Nomad
Is a browser plugin that brings the best of LibKey to wherever your users are on the web. Individuals can download and install it on their machines. A growing number of organisations have completed Trust wide deployments with significant impacts on ease of access to articles (and big jumps in article downloads as a result).
Essentially a button appears on pages with journal articles – if you click on the button, it either opens the article or brings the user to your ILL form. This means that someone browsing NEJM.org, for example, would be linked through to an article in your collections from Proquest or EBSCO. They don’t need to be searching via the Hub or your library web pages in order to get to the full text – so it is a very good way of reaching a wider audience, or helping users access content that they didn’t know was available to them.
We worked with Third Iron to build the INCDocs system using the data that powers LibKey to enable rapid requesting of articles from other libraries around the country.
Once a fortnight, EBSCO export the data in each Hub instance’s HLM and send it to Third Iron, who then upload it into their systems, so that the linking information is refreshed regularly. We can also ask Third Iron to do extra manual updates for any organisations who make a lot of changes to their holdings in HLM between these regular updates.
Where does OpenAthens fit into this?
OpenAthens is our national authentication tool – one OpenAthens username and password allows a user to access all of the resources that are bought for them (both locally and nationally). So it underpins everything else.
Wherever we can, we set up WAYFless OpenAthens links within the Hub – so that once a user is logged into OpenAthens, they can click on links to the various resources and their login is carried across to the resource, without them having to login again. So the best user journey with OpenAthens in the Hub is for someone to land on the Hub homepage, and immediately click the yellow bar at the top of the page to log themselves in with OpenAthens.
WAYFless URLs
WAYF = Where Are You From – ie, a website/resource needs to stop you and ask you to login, to check you’re eligible to access the resource.
WAYFless means that the link has some code embedded in it, that tells the website/resource where you are from already (ie it carries your authentication (OpenAthens) details across within the link), so that you aren’t asked to login again.
Registration
There should be someone in your organisation responsible for OpenAthens administration – they manage user accounts, and ensure access to resources is set up within the OpenAthens admin system.
This is our attempt at a (simplified) diagram to show how things link up:
An image showing how resource discovery systems fit together.
Why can I not have another Hub instance?
As mentioned, there are 250+ instances of the Hub. This is costly and time-consuming to maintain, both at a local and national level.
We started out with this many instances because there was a large variation between organisations in the range of subscribed digital knowledge resources available to their staff.
However, in line with the principles of Knowledge for Healthcare, we're increasingly working towards equity of access for all users. In order to support integrated care across the system, the vision is for all eligible users to have access to the same systems, content and services.
This is increasingly being achieved through joint working by KLS in each Integrated Care System (ICS) and, where possible, by extending the scope of national core content. Aligning the Hub infrastructure more with ICS footprints is an important enabler of this vision.
