How ARL Academic Libraries Present Open Web Resources — A Proposed Solution to Address Discoverability

Abstract

Open web resources on the Internet have become increasingly important in the scholarly community and are being cited ever more frequently in scholarly articles. Academic librarians continue to assess and collect open web resources that are of value to the academic community in order to support research. With the questions of how ARL academic libraries collect, present, and make searchable open web resources, this paper analyzes all ARL academic libraries' websites and finds that all of them are collecting valuable open web resources and presenting these on research/subject guides. This paper also finds that some ARL academic libraries implement search boxes for the collected list of open web resources, but only descriptions or titles of the resources housed on the libraries' website are being searched. None of the libraries makes the content or full text of open web resources discoverable on the academic library websites. Based on the findings, this paper proposes a solution to address the discoverability issue of collecting open web resources and how to make the content or full text of the open web resources searchable.