The impact of Resource Discovery Services (RDS) on usage of electronic content in UK academic libraries: selected results from a UKSG-funded project

Resource Discovery Services (RDS), also called Web-scale Discovery Services, have attracted considerable attention in recent years. This article aims to provide an environmental scan of the adoption of RDS in UK higher education libraries and provide an analysis of RDS resource usage data to gauge whether RDS have an impact on the overall usage of e-journals and e-books. Findings show that there appears to be a positive impact in most cases, although the extent of this impact varies across libraries and publishers. There is undeniably a degree of complexity in the usage analysis owing to the multi-dimensional nature of the environment.