Evaluation of Web Discovery Services: Reflections from Turkey

After the occurrence of Google and failure of federated search engines against Google, web discovery services appeared as a savior for libraries. Main importance of web discovery services is a google-like single search box, speed and comprehensiveness. This study aims an overview for web discovery services and analyzing the use and awareness of these services in Turkey. Web Discovery Services are used by 52 of the Turkish universities, 39 state universities and 13 private universities (August 2012). Ebsco Discovery Service (EDS) and Serial Solutions Summon are most commonly used discovery services in Turkey. EDS have 101 users (31 Universities, 3 Institutions, 1 Military Institution of Higher Education and 66 Ministry of Health Training and Research Hospitals), Summon have 21 users that all are universities. The other two discovery services, OCLC Worldcat Local, Encore Synergy and Primo Central don’t have any user in Turkey library market for now. According to the results of the conducted survey (February 2012) to all 160 higher education institutions in Turkey, 63 of the 74 respondents have information about web discovery services. About half of the 39 nonuser institutions attempted for using a discovery service.