Acceso usuarios
Antonella Trombone
Discovery tools are specialized portals for bibliographic research widely used in libraries with heterogeneous collections of electronic and digital resources. The feature distinguishing them from software for federated search among online resources is their central index, that is a database to which libraries have access thanks to the contract stipulated with the discovery tool software companies. Between the two parts composing a discovery tool - the central index and the search interface - librarians have paid great attention to the second during the selection and parametrization of these research systems. The fact that discovery tools are becoming the only access portal to library collections, especially in the academic field, should shift the attention to their core tool: the central index, that is, a large collection not containing documents but metadata redirecting the user to the original databases containing information and publications.
