A Platform for Discovery: Let’s Talk About OneSearch
The end of the Fall 2012 semester not only marks the end of instruction for CSN students but also marks the first complete semester CSN Libraries has offered our “OneSearch” platform and search box featured prominently on the Library homepage. The semester mark provides a good opportunity for us to revisit OneSearch once again, taking a look at just how it has been used, how it can be used and what its true purpose is in student research.
The OneSearch tool is found on the first tab of our Library website’s main search box at www.csn.edu/library. Clicking the CSN logo with the magnifying glass also brings up CSN’s OneSearch screen. Designed to look like the familiar Google page, OneSearch allows for more natural language searching (just like Google), so students can start looking for resources on their topic right away, even if they don’t know just the right keywords to use.
For example, a student researching video games’ effect on children might not pull out such keywords as “video games” “child,” “youth” or “adolescent” and connect them. But if she searches for the phrase “how video games affect children” in OneSearch, she’ll instantly receive relevant results ranging from a book on video games to an academic journal article in Adolescent Medicine Clinics. And that’s only two out of over 37,000 results. OneSearch is designed to be one single search that looks through as many CSN Library databases as possible, along with the Library catalog, to provide a broad overview of what’s available on a research topic. This way students can discover the content we have.
The technology itself is thus appropriately labeled a “Discovery” platform. The platform CSN Libraries uses is provided by the company SerialsSolutions, and is the same service UNLV has for its libraries as well (as seen at the top of their library home page here). According to the SerialsSolutions website, the “web-scale discovery service enables a familiar web-searching experience of the full breadth of content found in library collections—from books and videos to e-resources such as articles.”
With OneSearch, students don’t have to worry about knowing the exact content of over 90 databases to which CSN Library Services subscribes. They might not know we have a collection for the Las Vegas Review Journal: 1991-Present, but if they need local information about Oscar Goodman, typing his name into the OneSearch box will lead them to Las Vegas-Review Journal articles straight from our database. Before you know it, students are not only discovering, but learning where they can find more resources in the future.
Unfortunately, after a whole semester of testing, CSN Libraries has also been able to recognize the limitations of OneSearch. Despite its title, OneSearch can’t be the one and only search students perform—especially if they need content from a database that isn’t currently in OneSearch (not every database can be). For example, the biomedical collection MEDLINE doesn’t work with OneSearch, and so it’s been listed separately under our “Favorite Resources” on the Library home page so students can still get to it easily.
CSN Libraries always recommends using OneSearch in conjunction with our other databases and resources. If a student has a topic that’s specific to health or politics or literary criticism, etc., the Library already has specific health, political science and literary criticism databases that will return relevant information faster than it might take to weed through all the OneSearch results. The Library also has several Research Guides--individual web pages where students can find all their resources on a particular CSN program or academic subject in one spot.
For a beginning student who’s never done a research project before, CSN Libraries also recommends using our Start Your Research guide that walks students through the entire research process from finding a topic to citing sources, with recommended databases included every step of the way. OneSearch isn’t meant to be used for citing sources when we have so many citation guides included on our final Start Your Research step. And while the simplicity of OneSearch might make it easy to find articles that have been cited in a student’s paper, it isn’t meant to be a check for plagiarism either. Issues have occurred with OneSearch broken links or retrieving multiple results that are the same articles from the same databases. While we can’t make it perfect, we are aware of these issues and work constantly to resolve them. UNLV has been dealing with these same kinds of technical difficulties as they adjust to the new system as well, so we’re not alone in experimenting with this new tool. It could take over two years before the service is as singular as we’d like (and even then there will always be kinks to work out every once in a while). But like all tools, we learn how to use them best with practice and with time.
What CSN Library Services has already learned is that if students want to know whether or not we have resources for their research topics, if they’re looking for information they haven’t been able to find anywhere else or if they’re just trying to see what’s out there—that is where OneSearch truly shines.
In the end, the overall benefits of OneSearch seem to outweigh the technical difficulties. Students have been using the service (the site received over 10,850 visits in October 2012 alone, up from 8,067 visits in September 2012) and they have been receiving results (over 150,000 page views between August and November). Those students that CSN Library Services hears from generally report positive experiences too. For now, we will continue the OneSearch service and continue to gather data on how it’s working. Feedback from faculty, staff and students is especially important, so please contact a CSN Librarian if you run into any problems or if you’d like to share a success story. We’re hoping to hear more about the role OneSearch plays in student research in the future.