Attending Ivies+ Discovery Day: July 25th 2016 at MIT

MIT Libraries rotunda
MIT Libraries rotunda

The second annual Ivies+ Discovery Day took place at MIT in Cambridge, MA on July 25th 2016. Representatives from many of the Ivies+ libraries attended, including four librarians from Yale: Jenn Nolte, Sarah Tudesco, Angela Sidman and Kalee Sprague.

The day started off with a keynote address on discovery and serendipity from MIT Libraries Director Chris Bourg. Following that, Laura Morse from Harvard presented on updates from the Open Discovery Initiative, a NISO committee of which she is co-chair.

The later part of the morning then shifted into a ’round robin’ of 5 minute demonstrations followed by 5 minutes of Q&A  from eleven Ivies+ institutions. Each institution’s demo focused on their own particular discovery landscape. Some were at the beginning stages of implementation, others showcased the enhancements they’ve rolled out since the first Ivies+ Discovery Day in April 2015. Angela Sidman and Jenn Nolte demonstrated Yale’s unified discovery service, Quicksearch– which wasn’t even publicly available at Discovery Day last year!

After a lunch break, 2 consecutive breakout sessions followed with simultaneous presentations. The topics and slides for these are up on the Ivies+ Discovery Day website. Of particular note were presentations on discovery-related work at Yale University Library:

The path to Unified Discovery at Yale: Past, Present and Future (Jenn Nolte)
Discovery @ Yale: A Google Analytics Story (Sarah Tudesco)

The day ended with a fun and interactive session involving all attendees, with the goal of articulating and prioritizing collaborative efforts among Ivies+ institutions with regard to discovery. Attendees were given sticky notes to write down ideas for collaboration, and each attendee also received five stickers to vote on the ideas they liked the most. The notes from that exercise are also linked on the Ivies+ Discovery Day website.

The second Ivies+ Discovery Day was fast-moving, full of great information and great colleagues from across the Ivies+ universe. We attendees from Yale were very grateful for the excellent job our colleagues at MIT did in organizing the event, and look forward to Ivies+ Discovery Day 2017!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email