Serials Solutions Announces Summon, a New Unified Discovery Interface

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 01/20/2009

• Search interface integrates local holdings with articles from electronic resources
• Content pre-indexed in favor of real-time connections to external sources
• Content partnerships struck with more than 30 publishers

With Summon, a "unified discovery service," Serials Solutions has set its sights on the holy grail of library resource interfaces: a true one-box search, collecting article-level results from electronic resources with local catalog holdings into a single integrated results list. The service will be available for purchase later in 2009 via subscription based on population (FTE), in addition to an initial setup fee.

Much of Summon's design takes its cues from the success of Google's minimalist search portal and other destination searches found online. "The bottom line,” said Jane Burke, vice president of Serials Solutions, “is the simplicity of the screens, which makes library access consistent with users’ expectations and their experiences outside of libraries.”

Navigating results
Users can refine the results of a Summon search with a set of faceted browsing options, including date, format, topic, and sub-collection for multi-library systems. An open API will also help librarians direct users to library content effectively, said Mike Buschman, senior product manager at Serials Solutions, allowing Summon search boxes with pre-selected search targets to be embedded in department web pages and in course management software modules.

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Of course, as with any single solution designed to serve the needs of an audience with diverse research needs, the relevancy ranking of the initial results screen will determine much of the tool's effectiveness. The final relevancy ranking algorithm is currently being refined with the help of librarians at Dartmouth College Library and the Oklahoma State University Libraries, where Summon has been in beta tests since mid-November. (A preview of the unfinished software shown to LJ last week suggested that more refinement will be necessary.) Summon is expected to be opened up to users at the beta sites in the spring.

Index rather than connect
Summon sidesteps many of the problems inherent to aggregating search results from a diverse range of resources in real time—such as difficulties in mapping data fields, and server time-outs—by eschewing the connectors used by most federated search products.

All of the content accessible via the Summon interface is instead pre-indexed, allowing for normalized relevancy ranking of all of the records together, books and article-level results alike. To accomplish this, Serials Solutions will combine index data for local content like catalog records and repository holdings with relevant portions of the company's larger e-resource index, already up to 168 million records and growing.

To capitalize on this model, one of the most important undertakings in Serials Solutions' development of Summon has been the content partnerships it has forged. To date, the company has partnered with publishers Gale, ProQuest, and 30 others, including Oxford University Press, SAGE, Springer, and Taylor & Francis, to amass its "preprocessed repository of content," according to Burke.

But a library doesn't necessarily have to subscribe to the same external resources indexed by Serials Solutions in order to give its users full-text access, said Buschman. Using OpenURL and Digital Object Identifiers, Summon can transparently point an end user to an article through any of a library's resource subscriptions.

New hires at Serials Solutions
Buschman, a 2005 LJ Mover & Shaker, is one of a number of recent hires at Serials Solutions, coming from a previous positions as client services manager at IEEE and technical evangelist and program manager for Microsoft's Live Search Academic and Book projects.

Also, developer Andrew Nagy from the Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University recently joined Serials Solutions. Nagy has previously made news in library technology circles with his lead role in developing and promoting the open source VuFind discovery interface, recently awarded $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. 

Nagy told LJ that he will remain the lead developer on the VuFind project, in addition to serving as senior discovery services engineer for Serials Solutions.

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