Overview
What is Discovery?
Discovery is a library based-tool that ties together the many library research systems and databases into a single searchable system. Discovery operates similarly to Google, in the sense that it pulls information from all available sources, provides search capabilities, including searching full text, and then provides direct access to the full documents when they are available. To find Discovery, you can start from the library website, it appears at the top of the homepage.
Check the picture to see how Discovery looks like.
Why is Discovery important?
We acquire different sources in many different formats like print or online. In our library's collection you will find books, maps, print magazines, newspapers, and journals, online article databases, videos, music, and much more. Discovery allows you to access all these types of resources with a single search. However, not all resources are available from our library, in this case, Discovery helps you locate resources which are available at other libraries worldwide and you can request them through our Document Delivery Services .
What Discovery does
We subscribe to 70 databases in order to help you find information from books and articles published in a variety of periodicals like magazines, trade publications, and research journals. Discovery offers researchers the possibility of covering a good portion of a library's resources in a single search. To find resources you search using authors' names, titles of particular sources or having a topic. Results of a search are usually organized by relevance and it allows you to organize the relevant results to review them later, share them with others and cite them by using its integrated citation manager. Additionally, it allows you to find material which is open under open access license from a variety of institutions and organizations.
What Discovery does not do
In spite of the power and relative ease of use associated with discovery tools, until all content providers cooperate in sharing information about their content, there will be things that a discovery tool will not be able to access. Some databases included in a library's subscriptions just won't work with some discovery tools. In those cases, you should search these databases individually.
Should I use only Discovery for my research?
Discovery is a great place to start you research when you need academic sources like books and academic articles. This does not necessarily mean that you should not use tools like Google Scholar. The truth is that in research we jump from one tool to the other as they point out different types of resources. The greater benefit from using Discovery, is the variety of sources available from academic publishers through our subscriptions without paywalls.
What is this guide about?
This guide helps you familiarize yourself with the basic features, functions and interface of Discovery. It takes you through the steps of searching, organizing, evaluating, and personalizing your results within this system and tries to answer to some frequently asked questions regarding the tool.