Uncovering discovery layers

The NFAIS (National Federation of Advanced Information Services) — an organization I don’t have a lot of familiarity with – has recently issued a draft Code of Practice: Discovery Services Review with comments due in mid-March.

Given that major discovery services are in direct competition with each other, it isn’t difficult to imagine that a competitor doesn’t want to bring another competitor’s search results to the top, or to go to any great lengths to identify the source of the results that come from a competitor’s source.

From the news announcement:

However, the relative newness of these services has generated questions and concerns among information providers and librarians as to how these services meet expectations with regard to issues related to traditional search and retrieval services; e.g. usage reports, ranking algorithms, content coverage, updates, product identification, etc.