Resource Discovery Service for the University of Ulster

Tender description

Introduction: Ulster is a university with a national and international reputation for excellence, innovation and regional engagement. The University, with campuses at Belfast, Coleraine, Jordanstown and Londonderry, a student population of over 25,000 and some 1600 academic staff, makes a major contribution to the economic, social and cultural development of Northern Ireland and plays a key role in attracting inward investment. Its core business activities are teaching and learning, widening access to education, research and innovation and technology and knowledge transfer. Each campus has a library which provides a modern integrated learning space with the supporting help and other services needed to meet the study and computing needs of students and staff. In addition to its physical collections, the Library has a substantial web presence through which it makes available an extensive high-quality and wide-ranging scholarly collection of e-journals and e-books together with online subject guides. Background The resources – journal articles and books - that underpin the academic enterprise of teaching and research are increasingly being made available by commercial publishers in electronic format. This benefits students and academic staff in that these scholarly materials are readily available when needed and much more accessible whether from home or work, thereby reducing the need to travel to the library or come on campus other than to attend classes. A recent research project has identified that the use of scholarly material, especially journal articles, increases noticeably when a discovery service is introduced. Yet with this enhanced accessibility there is an attendant complexity for the user in that each publisher (or aggregator) provides their own interface to be decoded and, of course, no publisher has a monopoly on subject knowledge. In other words, relevant material may be found in the output of several publishers each hosted on their ow