JISC has commissioned a new September 2015 Spotlight Literature Review on scholarly discovery, which is available now in PDF. Short, but to-the-point…

in most cases staff over-estimate the extent to which users use different library services, in some cases very greatly. […] overall they think, it seems mistakenly, that the library discovery layer attracts very similar usage to Google Scholar”

one recent ethnographic study of student research behaviour (Dalal et al, 2015) highlights the low levels of information literacy skills displayed by many undergraduates even after library training in research skills [… they still had] very basic search techniques and poor search strategies [and a] Failure to locate the full text of articles.”

I’m interested in serendipity’s role in online search, and so I was pleased that the report pointed me to the December 2014 Library Journal article “Serendipitous Discovery: Is it Getting Harder?”. I was also rather tickled to discover that the word ‘serendipity’ was invented by Horace Walpole.