Serials Solutions have recently released a new set of enhancements for Summon which could be quite useful. Some of these have been implemented by default, and eServices have implemented some others so that you can have a look at the changes and provide feedback about what we should and shouldn’t keep, and which features we should develop further.

Read on for details about the enhancements…

10 Results per page – You’ll notice there are now only 10 results per page. This is the new default, but we can change it back to 25. Given the new search suggestions at the bottom of the page (see the next enhancement) it may be sensible to keep the page short, but what would our users prefer? SerSol believe it provides a more google-like experience, with the expectation being that the sought-after resource should be in the first few results. Any comments about your actual experiences with Summon search results?

Related search suggestions – Summon now suggests related and alternate queries at the bottom of the search results. This feature is set by default, and we don’t seem to have the ability to turn it off if we want to. Still, any feedback about the feature can be passed on to Serials Solutions.

Built-in AskLive widget – Users can now “Chat with Librarian” using the link at the top of the page which opens a default-styled LibraryH3lp widget. There’s not much we can do to customise this other than moving the link from the top of the page to the far right of the browser (displays as a tab centred vertically). We still need to test how it looks when nobody is logged in to Asklive (I’m not sure if it disappears or displays a message).

Enhanced database recommender – We can now edit the database recommendations by turning databases on or off and adding tags to specific databases. If there are any general searches that bring up inappropriate databases, or alternatively, general search terms that you think should recommend a particular database, let us know so that we can add them to the system.

Best bets – This new feature can be used to direct patrons to other library resources and services at the top of the Summon search results. For example, I’ve added a brief entry for “Library hours”. If anyone puts general search terms like “library hours” or “hours” into the multisearch box, then we can steer them in the right direction rather than giving them a dead-end. Unfortunately, there’re no HTML customisation allowed – just simple text (including bold and bulleted lists) and a URL which displays as “More”. If anyone has any suggestions for services or resources that you’d like to add to “best bets” let us know. It might be useful, for example, to add links to each of our subject guides. What do you think?

Feedback on these enhancements would be much appreciated – ideally as comments added to this post so that everyone can see, or if you prefer, as an email to Library eServices.

Donna
Library eServices