7 – Resource discovery

What would you build if you could start from scratch? This was the question posed to the JISC and RLUK resource discovery taskforce. The taskforce consisted of a group of experts from libraries, museums and archives in the UK higher education sector bought together to discuss how we should work together to develop the UK infrastructure for resource discovery. Resource discovery has always been a challenging issue, but recently we have seen a revolution in user behaviour thanks to massive leaps forward in software and hardware technologies. This chapter starts with a discussion on the background and history of the resource discovery infrastructure in the UK and the broader context of the change in technology and user behaviour before describing how the resource discovery taskforce aims to develop UK infrastructure to meet those challenges. This is related to parallel efforts in other nations and similar initiatives with different types of content such as Europeana, Digital New Zealand, Culture Grid and the Learning Registry.