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See Best Practices for Decision Pages and Tags for groups

Legend:

Status
title not started

Status
colour Yellow title IN PROGRESS

Status
colour Red title STALLED

Status
colour Green title decided

Recommendation

Describe the final recommendation/decision.

Impact

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Stakeholder group

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Impact

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Who does this decision affect? [name of the group]

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Explain the significance of the decision to EACH stakeholder group. How will this decision impact this particular group? What will change? Do they need to take any action? If so, when?

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Recommendation

Harmonization is undesirable due to the unique needs of each campus. Each campus should make the decision based upon their collection and user needs.

Background

Prior to the migration to a consortium, campuses were able to curate their CDI collections. While this required them to turn on access to individual collections, it also allowed them to weed out collections with poor metadata.

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We are revisiting this issue in order to provide guidance and examples of the pros and cons of limiting by availability or not.

What is Filter by Availability?

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• CDI has tens of millions of records. By default, a search will surface all CDI results regardless of availability to the library.

• When configuring a search profile that includes the Central Index search scope, libraries can opt to “Filter by Availability” so that the search profile will not surface results that do not have full text availability. So, the only CDI records that would display would be those with full text availability.

• This setting causes the “Expand My Results” toggle to display. Then, if a user wants to include results for CDI records that do not contain full text, they can select the Expand My Results check box.

Options Considered

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Option 1: Limit CDI by Availability

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Option 2: CDI displays all results, regardless of availability

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Description

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Pros

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Cons

Dependencies

Questions to consider

• There was no good option with easy active vs fully flexible. There were pros and cons on both sides. Easy active was less work on the catalog side of things.

• How does the EasyActive Exception List work? Is it theoretically possible to manually shut stuff off?

• Consider that the whole point of this shared catalog thing was to get everything accessible by the UCs into one bucket for people to discover, even if it’s not currently on the shelf or subscribed to. An increased ILL Workload is definitely going to be a part of that.

  • What options do we have on the Discovery side to reduce the number of “bad” requests coming from inaccurate metadata records?

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	Default	Filter by Availability
Description	A search will return all relevant CDI results regardless of availability. Users will see electronic article and ebook results that are available online as well as those they must submit a request for.	A search will only return CDI results with full text availability. Articles and ebooks that must be requested are filtered out.
Pros	Being able to find literally anything that's in the cdi. Risk around known item and niche materials not being surfaced when things are filtered. Easy to allow people to place a request for something that’s not in the UC. Also the citation can be good which helps us in ILL find the thing the person wants.	Ex Libris expects that libraries are filtering. (that’s a pro?) Hides unavailable stuff from undergraduates. Simplifies the results and gets them stuff that gets their assignments completed.
Cons	Exposes undergrads to a lot of unavailable stuff and they did NOT like that. Looks like half the stuff in library is unavailable. There is some painfully bad, absolute junk in the CDI Some stuff is impossible to ILL. (dissertations, that only exist in one place. Datasets. Collections of CDI like NDL, medieval manuscripts from Europe that we have no access to.) It annoys people when they place requests for material they won’t be able to get.	Existing issue with real time availability makes some available items not show up because system isn’t processing them right. Grad/faculty searching for known items are unable to find what they need. User selection fatigue because of all of the options on the left hand side. Some confusion about “expanding” while all other filters limit results. Can’t get people to toggle unfilter.

Local Decisions

UCR: Our default search profile, Articles, Books, and More, includes CDI collections unfiltered. UCR decided this for now in the spirit of providing as much access to outside resources as possible.

However, the local IZ catalog, UC Riverside Catalog, includes the CDI scope filtered by availability, and excluding ebooks.

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The idea was that we wanted the UCR Library profile to show users what they could theoretically get “right now” by walking to a shelf or clicking an available online link. The only items they would have to put any kind of request on would be print items that were checked out/lost/in transit. We excluded eBooks to reduce duplication because CDI and IZ holdings do not dedupe.

The second code, IZ_CRRestricted, is the MyInstitution scope modified to exclude records flagged as course reserve restricted in order to keep restricted items (such as professor copies) from surfacing outside of the course reserve search scope.

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UCSF: Our default search profile (‘Search articles, books, and more’) includes CDI collections, and we have Filter by Availability turned on

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We don't have any undergrads and it’s usually more important to our audiences to see everything (rather than only what’s available now).

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UCI: Our default search profile “Articles, books, and more” is set to not filter by availability and also exclude CDI eBooks

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We have decided to leave the filter off in favor of increasing the discoverability of resources that would otherwise be hidden initially by having it on. In most cases tested, the results of the search with the filter on or off returned a large number of results and the tester was doubtful of how useful it was only having a slightly smaller result set vs the increased visibility of more records that were also relevant.

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UCSC: Our default search profile, “Articles, books, and more” is set to filter by availability

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Our local team prioritizes undergraduate student success when making design and configuration decisions. Our testing with undergraduate students indicates that students expect most materials in UC Library Search to be available immediately (either online or on the shelf). We found that not filtering by availability too frequently retrieved results where fewer than 70% of items were availability immediately. We are concerned about the obstacles filtering by availability presents for users attempting to find known item CDI materials that are not “available” and we continue to work on interface changes to facilitate the discovery of these materials.

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