Finding what you know you have: Known-Item Searching in ad Discovery Environment

Abstract

When the University of Minnesota Libraries announced that its instance of the Aleph OPAC would be retired with the Libraries' move to Alma, public services librarians and end users alike were concerned about losing a key catalog feature: Finding known items. To determine whether known item searching performance was adequate in its proposed blended Primo and Primo Central search, the Primo implementation team set about testing a large number of title searches in both environments. The results show that known item search success rates in Primo are comparable to the Aleph OPAC, even with a blended search. But there are still tricks to improving success, just as there were with the OPAC. This session will outline the process and results, as well as the steps we've taken to educate library staff and end users.