Bento Box Discovery

Poster presentation at the University of Maryland Libraries Research & Innovative Practice Forum on June 8, 2016. The poster proposes that the UMD Libraries should evaluate adoption of Bento Box Discovery for improved user search experience.

Users find the the list of resources and terms for finding information bewildering: book, journal, article, database, resource, catalog, worldcat, guide, website, google scholar, institutional repository, digital collections, archives, etc. What they really want is a single search box which will return a single, relevance-ranked result set across all Libraries' resources and more. In the absence of a single data source to support such a search, Libraries for many years have tried to dynamically aggregate and de-duplicate federated searches across multiple data sources, called metasearch, which has not worked very well. In recent years a new model, often called Bento Box, has become popular which attempts to come closer to the ideal search. In this model the user enters their search into a single box, then multiple sources are searched and presented back on a single result screen, boxed into separate areas without de-duplication, with only a few results from each source. Then the user can clearly see that results have come from multiple sources and either select a specific hit or see more results from any of the sources.