5.3: Discovery Services (OneSearch)

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Library discovery services are the newest of the tools available to student researchers. Discovery services allow a user to conduct a search across multiple collections at once. Whether you need books from your library’s physical collection, a piece of microfilm, a newspaper article from the 1800’s, or a scholarly article just published in a well-regarded journal, a discovery service will provide relevant search results.

It has long been a dream of libraries to provide their users with a single search tool that searches across their entire collections, both print and electronic. Discovery services represent their current best effort at creating such a tool, allowing users to search the full contents of a library’s local print collection and a majority of the database content in a single search.

Discovery services are not without issues that you need to know about. While the content of most databases subscribed to at your local library may appear in its discovery service search results, the content of some databases will not. Determining which databases are included in your local discovery service and which are not can be difficult.

Another shortcoming of discovery services is the lack of discipline or database-specific search tools. For example, consider the nursing database CINAHL. While articles located in CINAHL may appear in keyword searches in your local discovery service, you will not have access to CINAHL’s special subject heading controlled vocabulary tool unless you conduct your search within the database itself. Or a student researcher interested in finding content on certain kinds of businesses and industries may want to search for information using NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes. These six digit codes can be searched in select business databases, but a discovery service is unlikely to provide that same functionality, even if the articles and reports themselves will appear in discovery service search results.

Tip: For research projects where you are asked to have a mix of books and articles as references, discovery services can be ideal places to begin your research. Discovery services can also be helpful when your research topic is multidisciplinary in nature (i.e., it touches on the literature from several fields of study,) as it draws in search results from databases in a number of different fields in a single search.