Dartmouth Opens Summon Beta to Faculty and Students

Librarians worry about losing specificity of resources, but students seem ready to adapt

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 7/2/2009

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"Soft" launch of discovery service
Initial feedback positive, with reservations
Trade-off between specificity and "unified" interface

The highly anticipated commercial launch of Serials Solutions’ Summon discovery platform will take place at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Chicago (see the original announcement of the software).

Also much anticipated has been the first open beta of the product recently launched at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, where librarians, faculty, and students—and other interested parties—can now take the service for a test drive in a library setting.

As reported earlier, Summon offers an aggregated index of metadata that spans article-level journal holdings from Serials Solutions as well local digital collections and bibliographic data.

In contrast with federated search that draws results from remote data sources individually and in real-time, Summon instead pre-indexes content so that it can better normalize all of the metadata. This in turn allows for a more options in terms of relevancy ranking and facets (based on metadata) for refining search results.

Early take on Summon
So what’s been the reaction so far? The public beta had its "soft" opening only a few weeks ago, but preliminary reaction has been positive, said Cynthia Pawlek, deputy librarian for Dartmouth College Library. "[P]eople like the simple search box and design, the speedy response time, and the direct links to full text very much," she told LJAN.

And though relatively few users are around between spring and fall semesters to put the interface through its paces, early testers have given positive feedback about "the idea of having all the library's 'quality' content brought together under one interface," she said.

Summon also can index metadata of locally-curated content, such as for digital archive materials, though Dartmouth has yet to implement this feature.

Should everything be unified?
Of course, as is to be expected, reservations remain. "Perhaps the greatest difficulty for us is in describing the difference between a service like Summon and our existing federated search service," Pawlek said.

Also, she noted, "librarians are concerned about the lack of information about specific resources and databases included, and about the loss of specialized search, vocabulary and results management features. Getting complete accuracy at all times with the full-text linking is challenging, and disappointing when it does not work smoothly."

Unsurprisingly, students "seem to accept this more readilly," she said, "and move on to other resources revealed through Summon to satisfy their needs. The relevancy ranking is very important when dealing with such large data sets, and has been steadily improving during the beta period."

Making the case for discovery
Serials Solutions has also undertaken an campaign to educate potential customers about the needs of students and scholars identified via their own market research. Observations on user interaction with discovery tools along with research from leading librarians in the field were recently collected in an LJ webcast sponsored by Serials Solutions titled "Building ROI through Discovery: Leveraging the Value of the Library Collection."

The presentaion includes panelists Carol Tenopir, professor at the School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Online Databases columnist for LJ, and Anne Prestamo, associate dean for collection and technology services at Oklahoma State University (OSU) Libraries. The panel was moderated by Jane Burke, vice president and executive director at Serials Solutions.

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