EconBiz-Experiences: Creating our own discovery system for business & economics

Abstract

EconBiz (econbiz.de) is a subject portal for business and economic developed by the German National Library of Economics (ZBW). It advanced from a subject guide to a discovery system over the past decade. The portal provides journal articles, book chapters, working papers, monographs and conferences. A thesaurus also created and maintained by ZBW and its partners enhances the search experience of the portal. EconBiz is a free portal that can be used by anyone in the world. Whereas discovery systems usually focus on one university campus, EconBiz tries to provide access to publications for everyone. However, the portal functions as a discovery system for local users of ZBW. Thus improving the availability and access to documents on a local and national level as well as on an international level is an ongoing project in the development. Showing the best possible options of access is based on a complex negotiation between reference librarians, user feedback as well as metadata- and IT specialists.

This paper will also highlight the fruitful collaboration of reference librarians, metadata experts and IT specialists. The EconBiz team grew over the past few years, and in 2012 the first PhD-student in Computer Science joined the EconBiz team in order to combine new research and development with the development of the portal.

The improvement of information literacy is another aspect tightly interwoven with the portal. A Guided Walk is supposed to help students with the most pressing questions like “how to search and evaluate,” “how to access the full-text” and “how to cite.” This paper covers experiences related to the latest relaunch of the portal in March 2017. Some future plans will also be discussed.