The Library is seriously looking at Summon to replace 360 Search and possibly be our main search mechanism. It will also search our catalogue, UC Research Repository and Digital Library. A number of staff went to the demonstration both in the Library and at conference. Some sites are
http://unisa.summon.serialssolutions.com/
http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/home/find/summon/
The advantages of Summon
• it is a Google like, one stop search
• the content is preindexed and facetted, which makes it much faster that other federated products
• searching across all the content at once rather than 30 items from 6-8 databases so relevance works properly
• it gets around the problems shown in the usability testing where students don’t know the difference between a journal and a database
Summon is new and there are some gaps in coverage. It does not currently index 2,500 of our 18000 unique current titles. The list of approx 400 peer reviewed titles is available at K:\projects\Catalogue_replacement_implementation\UC_non_overlap.xls. Please let me know if there are any titles in here you would be particularly concerned about and I can feed this back to Serials Solutions.
The Library will still have a catalogue. Library IT is looking at VuFind as an option.
Please provide feedback on what you think of the product. If we go ahead it will happen rapidly as we need to get it into this year’s budget.
Cheers, Anne
It should also be significantly faster than 360 Search.
I can’t find the other post about the session that was held so I will comment here instead…
I think Summon is a good product and will make a good replacement for Search 360. It has a lot of functionality we don’t have anywhere else. It is, perhaps critically, much faster and more intuitive than Search 360. If working properly, it will be well liked and well used.
This said I think there are some caveats:
1. connectivity – the university network is not always fast or reliable – this will be even more necessary for what will be a very visible product. As it is offsite will students pay connection charges? If they like it this may be significant.
2. relevancy ranking – This is something we don’t have at the moment with the current PAC so it would be a big improvement. Apparently this can be "tweaked" – This could make a lot of difference in a lot of subjects so would have to be done carefully and hopefully explained somewhere so those using it know what they are getting.
3. content – early days but, as above, would need to be made clear to those using it what they are searching across.
4. Although it is possibly even better than our current PAC it is not a replacement for the PAC. It is unlikely to have same level of functionality as an actual PAC so we would also need to put a new PAC in. My vote is for VuFind – A good working example can be seen at Nat Lib Aus – http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/
my 2 cents
adam
Some answers
Connectivity – there have been issues that we continue to report to ICTS. We will also have the backup of the catalogue. Summon can go through Ezproxy but there are trade offs as it will exclude others which will cause problems for MB users. One solution may be to ezproxy it in Learn but not on our homepage??
Relevance Ranking – not sure how much tweaking can be done here. Wait till we see it working first.
Content – Google does not tell you what you are searching. At any one point in time no-one can be clear what content they are searching. We do need to be clear about situations when other dataases may be more appropriate.
Catlogue – Agee see also http://libcat.usq.edu.au/
Cheers, Anne
I like the look and general performance of Summon – certainly a leap forward from 360 and what OCLC had to show us. My only real concern is the 3 year sub. ‘offer’. One year ago we went with 360 as it was the best thing going, and now 12 months later it most certainly isn’t. 2 years at a stretch, maybe, to commit to Summon seems OK but 3 makes me wince a bit – even at a decent discount.
Dave C.
Is it possible this could be used to connect directly to and provide search results for our archives and art description database? If so, that would be fantastic as it truly would be a ‘one stop shop".
Jeff
Jeff, from talking to the Serials Solutions – Summons vendors at LIANZA conference – I asked this very question and their answer was that Summon pre-harvests content and can add whichever databases you ask them to, including internal databases – the answer appeared to be yes, this could allow federated "one stop shop" searching across our archives and art database and others.
Sounds like it has a lot of potential. It would be interesting to know how configurable the ‘refine your search option’ is. On the University of Sydney site you can refine by ‘content type’ and I wonder if we could add specific archives/art options such as still image, text archive, architectual drawing,work of art etc. to the list of content options.
Summon potentially can index the IR, Digital Library, we may even be able to extract item level archives records, but it will not happen during the intial installation of Summon. Also given that we will have to massage the records, they will probably be indexed weekly or monthly. Summon cannot be customised by individual libraries, so there will be limitation on what can be done. Anne
We have paid for 360 Search for 2 years and had access for 2.5 years. Anne
It’s a pity about the configuration options for the ‘refine content’ search. It would be nice if they at least had an ‘archive’ or ‘art’ option because it is hard to see how the art/archives collections would fit within the current refine content options.
Hmmm…interesting to note that Dartmouth site http://www.dartmouth.edu/~l… content filter option is configured differently to the Sydney site. In fact they even have a ‘Archival Material’, ‘photograph’ and ‘manuscript’ options, respectively. Perhaps it is the case that Summons comes with pre-defined content filters and the institution decides what to display and/or use?
New interface of Current Index to Statistics has added a nice feature to results of books..
– books that cite this book
– books cited by this book
Would be nice to have this in a new catalogue. Seems to just run off the ISBN.
Here is an example…
http://cis.statbib.org/book…
Not to mention output to bibtex!
Will the IR be included in the first installation?
Summon is introducing a mobile-optimized interface http://mobile-libraries.blo…