Preface

More and more often, browsing the websites of both Italian and foreign universities, the section dedicated to libraries is unfortunately often absent from the main menus and those who manage to reach it no longer find a well-highlighted link to the online catalog, but a 'Google-like' search box that allows you to enter one or more terms. This also without neither the possibility of specifying whether they refer to authors, titles, subjects or anything else, nor connecting them with the Boolean operators. The result is a very long list of document descriptions, of which in some cases, depending on one's access rights, it is possible to read the full text online or locate it in the physical collections of the libraries of that university. To such softwares, which are part of the broader family of the so-called Web-Scale Discovery Services and which are mainly referred to – after an initial period of uncertainty – as discovery tools (while there are still those who call them, more generically, 'portals', specifying only sometimes 'for bibliographic research'), and which in some countries for some years have also been spreading to other types of libraries, Roberto Raieli has dedicated this very clear, complete, updated and documented book, which was in fact needed, and which also includes rather broad and relevant considerations on related issues such as open access, the semantic web, linked data and information literacy.