Our New Search to Deliver Open Access, Cost-Savings, and Faster Results in ILL.

Today, we’re announcing upgrades to our title and citation searching systems for Interlibrary Loan to deliver dramatically better results in Open Access. Testing of items searched using our ILL tools showed our new systems can deliver 30% more results when using titles previously used in DeliverOA.

We’ve made these changes in response to the incredible level of adoption of DeliverOA and feedback from our users. Title and citation searching is hard, and there are no easy answers. To achieve our 30% improvement, we integrated with Bing (yes, you read that right: Google provides no API to enable this) to power automated web-scale searches from titles and citations to sources with more metadata. Then, we make sure they’re the same article, run it through our search for Open Access alternatives with sources like Unpaywall, and finally use our own systems to send users direct to full text. As the Bing integration means each search costs us money, we’re currently running the system only on our tools for libraries, including EmbedOA, DeliverOA and OAsheet.

If you haven’t tried DeliverOA yet, now is the time! It’s available to help deliver Open Access content on Illiad, Clio and now Alma. If you’re still considering it, we encourage you to see how Open Access could impact your campus by uploading recent requests to OAsheets, reading about others’ experiences, and getting your questions and concerns about Open Access answered in our new OA in Interlibrary Loan handbook.

These join major updates, released earlier this year, on how we find Open Access copies, allowing for a greater number of faster and more accurate results that direct you straight to full-text (not splash) pages. We did this by using result caching and smarter content filters, and by adjusting how we use different sources. These changes are immediately available for everyone, on all our systems.

We’ll continue to improve our systems and collaborate with groups such as Unpaywall and our other sources to make sure no stone is left unturned in the search to deliver open content. We would like to thank Arcadia — a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin — for enabling these improvements.