The Fickle, the Federated, the Frustrating: Library Search Experiences
Discovery layers promised a more seamless search experience than our old, clunky federated search or bento box experiences (though many of those are still chugging along). But what if a more seamless experience is a fool’s errand? After a decade of trying to understand and fix search experiences, we want to offer a brief history showing how we got to the current state of search in libraries. Have we advanced beyond silos, and when it comes to information seeking behavior, are silos so bad? We have had to adapt our search interfaces to become more personal and localized throughout the pandemic since this was the only way to reach our users. As some of these changes are likely to become permanent, we will explore how we can all share our successful changes with the larger library community no matter our search platform.
