We now have access to Summon but there are some delays.
• The first load of the UC catalogue is loading now and should be finished by tomorrow morning
• Live availability is delayed for a number of weeks but the link back to our catalogue should work
• Online loads on a daily basis will not be available until early to mid Feb so the catalogue records will be out-of-date
• UC Research Repository and DSpace are not yet available
• The live site is not affected by the work above so can be relied on for teaching.
Please test and let Library IT know of any issues, in particular with the federated coverage. Does it contain everything you expect?
Thanks, Anne
How should we know what to expect if we don’t know what it is federating or did you mean in a more general sense – e.g. the types of materials rather than a specific database or publication(s)?
It is definitely a lot better than Serials Solutions already! Much faster though the linking through is grindingly slow. Images of some book covers seem pretty blurry..
Needs to have a "Home" button that took us back to the Summon Home page rather than back to the Library Home Page.
Eventually the Library home page will include the Summon search box, so why would you want to return to the Summon home page?
1. Coz there is so much stuff on the Library Home Page that is distracting. One of the beauties of the Summon Home page (Yes, Like Google) is that it is nice and empty – which for me seems to help the search process….
2. Because within Summon you are quite clearly in a different application – an environment that is quite clearly for a particular purpose. Within any such environment it is really a web convention that you should be able to hit "Home" and it takes you back to the "Home" for that environment rather than the Library Home page which takes you to links for lots of things.
3. As it is set out at the moment opening the home page of summon the cursor automatically goes in to the search box allowing you to type what words you want and then hit enter straight away and begin the search. If you can’t duplicate that convenience when you jump back to the library home page you are taking something away.
Some comments about the coverage in each subject would be good. It should include in searching many of the resources that we pay for (and some we dont). I dont think Elsevier is there yet.
As Deborah says, you will never see the generic Summon search box, it will be embedded into other things.
Working well this morning and the book covers I have spotted are much sharper images – may have been just a few yesterday.
Book covers are excellent. Makes it much easier to find the edition you are after – Try searching Anton Calculus and you can soon spot the one with the cyclists on the cover.
Books seem to have loaded but seems to have left out electronic resources that are in the catalogue – e.g. Bib#: 1120455
Doesn’t seem to be (as yet) indexing LCSH in Library catalogue records. For example if you search for Ernest Rutherford you get the items where he is the author or his name appears in the title but not the major biographies of him unless his name is also in the title..
Seems to have gone live in case no-one noticed…
Yes – quietly done on Friday afternoon, since it’s still in development, but Education need it now for teaching purposes. Plus the results are better than what we were getting with 360 search.
There will be proper publicity when it’s "officially" live, and we’re happy with the search indexes, etc.
Donna
Just had a quick look at the APA/Endnote functionality via the saved searches. The authors come out very wonky – it looks like Summon can’t cope whenever a database provides author information in as "Firstname Lastname" (ie quite often): in this situation it comes into Endnote as "Firstname, Lastname" (effectively switching the two) and in APA format it doesn’t even try to abbreviate the first name(s) to initials. Probably a good idea for students not to use these features while this is an issue, which is a shame because both would be extremely useful!
Deborah
A few quirks but an excellent tool already and so much better than 360 search. The only real problem I am having so far – that also comes with Google Scholar – is knowing which materials are covered…
I’m puzzled about how Summon searches the Library’s catalogue. Here’s an example:-
A catalogue Keyword search for "psychoacoustics" retrieves 30 records and includes books, book chapters and one conference proceeding. There are 20 books in the Library with this Subject Heading.
However, a search on Summon limited to books retrieves just 9 records. In 7 of these "psychoacoustics" occurs in the title and in 2 records the Notes field.
It would be really helpful to know just which parts of a catalogue record Summon is searching?
Patricia
Good speedy response times from searching yesterday. Also found linking through to full text fairly speedy in most cases.
I think we are moving over to Ebsco for our key POLSci database, which could leave it out of Summon coverage?
I don’t hold out too much hope re EndNote functionality and use with Fed search products generally.
Dave C.
I’ve never seen citation functions work perfectly anywhere (not just Summon) – obviously the data doesn’t differentiate between first names and surnames, so it can’t format them correctly. Summon has a warning "Always check your references for accuracy". It’s still much quicker to use these tools and make corrections than it is to create citations from scratch, so I wouldn’t discourage students from using it – we just need to make them aware that they should check the formatting.
With regards to catalogue searches, this part is still under development. It only includes records and updates up to late November (regular updates won’t start until mid-Feb), and we still need to tweak search indexes where necessary. Live availability data will be coming in a couple of weeks. We’re also still waiting on IR and Digital Library records to be harvested.
Serials Solutions have also mentioned that they’ve managed to increase the average search times from 2.5s to 800ms.
Donna
A list ot titles represented in Summon is available here K:/projects/Summon/Summon-represented-titles.pdf taken from the Summon site (http://www.serialssolutions…). Note that this list is not based on our subscriptions.
I assume the 800ms is at their end rather than average of remote sensors?
When term starts it is going to slow down significantly – the youtube effect…
That being said it should still be usable most of the time which is not something that could have been said with 360.
The LCSH tweek is a definite change needed as otherwise some books just won’t show up at all. Particularly where titles and subject headings are very different.
Content:
At the moment about 75% of searches of databases we subscribe to are on only about 7-8 databases. Obviously this will change which ones are "hit" – depending of course on which ones are included.
So we don’t have to try and figure out ourselves which are (not) included can someone tell me which of the top ones searched are in there??
Most Searches (2009)
EBSCO Databases
ProQuest
HeinOnline
Web of Knowledge
JSTOR
CSA Databases
ScienceDirect
Scopus
InfoTrac
Westlaw
Thanks Donna – You read my mind..
Donna – is there only a list of journal titles or does it also line up with databases somehow? And for Physical Sciences I would be very keen to know which non-sub (i.e. open access) resources are covered because in Physical Sciences these are used a lot and some of them are more important than the databases we subscribe too…
One aspect that I find very irritating in Summon is that you can’t select a range of options to tailor your search and then click the search button. For example, if you want to limit to scholarly articles, add a couple of subject terms, limit by date and then by language you have to click search 4 or 5 times. Is there a way around this?
Janette
Donna has created a wiki page to add in any issues you find with Summon http://wiki.canterbury.ac.n…
If you could please add issues to it this week we can give it to Heather to discuss with Serials Solutions at the inaugural user group meeting at VALA
Cheers, Anne
I have reservations about Summon/Mulitsearch being the top link ie above the cataloge. A new student asked for help just at the Desk earlier because she wanted to find the recommended text ‘Doing gender in media, art and culture’ . She typed the extact title into the first search box she saw ie Summon, and the first item that comes up has that title, but it is a book review. It is (correctly I suppose, but not very usefully to the student) labelled as a fulltext journal article. So the student thinks its the book text which is avaialable electronically…
The record for the book itself comes up on the sixth page of results -after heaps of less relevant ones. Doesn’t the relevancy system here take a phrase into account?? If you do a search with just the keywords eg ‘doing gender media art’ the book comes up second. MAny of the excessive number of marginal or irrelevant results occur because Summon is picking up fulltext, yet there not seem no to be a way to tell it to look by subject or abstract keyword.
I think you can do what Janette is describing using the Advanced Search option, which is available as soon as you get to the results screen, or via the url "http://canterbury.summon.se…"
Catherine