Discovery services based on a central index: their expansion in Spanish academic libraries and future research lines

Discovery services constitute an element of innovation and modernization for university and research libraries. In recent years their presence has become strong in Spain, with the new generation of these systems, commonly referred to as web-scale discovery services, although it is more meaningful to categorize them as index-based discovery services. The multinational companies ProQuest and Ebsco are especially competing in the dissemination of this model, as they integrate information retrieval software with the bibliographic databases they distribute. The reasons for the success of these services are evaluated, with their advantages and disadvantages, as well as the research lines they are generating.