Rethinking Discovery and Access to Streamline Content Delivery

Users have many discovery tool options for finding academic sources, and many users have demonstrated their preference for free and easy to use discovery tools and scholarly content access. But what do real scholarly searchers' discovery workflows look like when considering real users with real research questions, which requires access to unique or subscription-based sources? Rather than making decisions about how to adapt our discovery and access platforms (like Primo) based on librarian searching preferences or outdated assumptions of user behavior, we invited participants to record videos of their searches to better understand their realistic source discovery and access workflows. We will share the results of this research, including the barriers users encounter and their use of AI, along with our resulting decisions to focus the types of content we provide and simplify access choices to more clearly define the library's lane in the evolving discovery and access landscape.