Paratext and Compendium Library Services announced an expanded three-level structure for bird®, a comprehensive guide to research databases. These new levels—bird: CORE, bird: ADVANCED, and bird: COMPLETE—let libraries choose the discovery, local collection context, and comparative analysis that fit their needs.
Curated by research librarians, bird covers more than 9,800 commercial and Open Access research databases. The integrated holdings comparison service, nest®, now includes database collections from over 800 academic libraries.
bird: CORE provides a continuously maintained view of the research database landscape for systematic discovery and current awareness.
bird: ADVANCED places a library’s database holdings within the wider field, helping librarians identify gaps and overlap, respond to academic priorities, and support acquisition, renewal, cancellation, and collection review.
bird: COMPLETE adds nest® comparative holdings analytics and Collection Memory, a new knowledge base preserving collection decisions as staff and priorities change.
This latest release also introduces Ask bird, an AI-assisted tool for natural-language questions about databases in bird’s proprietary inventory, complementing the current search and browse options.
See full press release here.
