Webcast: Web-scale Discovery in Real Life, a Report from Early Adopters

Serials Solutions' Summon beta testers offer insights

Dodie Ownes -- Library Journal, 9/29/2009 8:27:00 AM

• Service described as “simple, elegant, and powerful”
• Web-scale discovery allows for more accurate and precise results
• 40 percent of Grand Valley’s catalog hits coming from Summon

Web-scale discovery has advanced from theory to reality, and in the fourth webcast of "Returning the Researcher to the Library" series, Serials Solutions tapped three institutions beta testing its new Summon service to relay the experience, results, and reactions.

Moderated by Mike Buschman, senior product manager for the Summon service, the webcast panel represented both medium and large academic institutions, and the 300-plus live audience included attendees from virtually every library market segment.

The Western Michigan experience
Scott Garrison, associate dean for public services and technology at Western Michigan University (WMU), Kalamazoo, opened his presentation with background on size/FTE and in-library technology, such as Voyager and SFX, noting that a supportive infrastructure has allowed WMU to take advantage of the latest technologies. Diving right into content management, Garrison dropped the S word—silo—which tapped into the audience mindset, prompting questions about ejournal coverage, database overlap, and special collections access.

With web-scale discovery, WMU library staff has had to adjust to the greater recall of results that may require more narrowing, while other faculty has been enthusiastic about the more-is-more approach. Garrison called the Summon service “simple, elegant, and powerful” and built on a foundation of good tools. 

WMU’s implementation is complete, with Summon available on the main library web site. While users adjust, the service has exposed a few issues with OpenURL targets and the library’s own metadata, which has been part of the learning experience. With new features appearing in successive releases and positive feedback from faculty and students, WMU Libraries is feeling good about the decision to make web-scale discovery available to its users.

University of Calgary ready for rollout
After an introduction to the University of Calgary, Alberta, and its Libraries & Cultural Resources division, Paul Pival, public services systems librarian, outlined the basis of the institution’s need for a web-scale discovery service. While existing finding tools were fine for discovering books and printed materials, the school was challenged to discover a way to access materials beyond the traditional collection, such as artifacts, rugs, and supporting materials that students and faculty may not even know exist. 

Wanting to break down its silos (the s word again), Calgary tried federated search, but found searching to be too slow. Pival outlined the differences between federated search and web-scale discovery in terms of speed, result sets, and content management. With an optimized and normalized database, he explained, web-scale discovery allows for more accurate and precise results, and Summon can handle the wide variety of metadata formats being thrown at it.

Pival has librarians “kicking the tires” of the Summon service now, and the feedback has been encouraging. Result delivery is very fast, and enhancements to the service arrive weekly, improving relevancy of results and increasing publisher access. The service will be rolled out to students and faculty in early October, and Pival hopes to have Summon fully implemented in 2010 to coincide with the opening of university’s newest research facility, the Taylor Family Digital Library.

Big impact at Grand Valley State University
Ron Berry, director of technology and information resources at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) Libraries, MI, provided background on his institution’s student body, educational focus, university library holdings, and technology. Given GVSU’s distributed campus environment and lack of new building space, access to digital content has been the primary focus of its interest in web-scale discovery. Interestingly, because reference questions have dropped, while most other library usage stats continue to go up, GVSU will be taking reference librarians off the reference desk this fall.

With $4 million of online resources in the budget, GVSU determined that it needed to offer patrons a combined results set that includes the library catalog, databases, indexes, and archival material. Since launching Summon as the default gateway in August 2009, response from staff and patrons has been positive. Impact has been felt in bibliographic instruction and usage statistics. Berry reported that about 40 percent of the catalog hits are coming from Summon referral, indicating that the catalog isn’t dead yet.

Throughout the webcast, questions continued to build up from audience members, some specific—“Ron, can you elaborate why reference librarians are no longer at ref desks? Where are they instead?”—and others more general, such as “Do any of the libraries plan on replacing federated searching with Summon?” to which GVSU’s Berry answered “it already has.” 

When asked how Summon’s overlap with ejournal collections looked, Pival indicated that 99 of the top 100 downloaded titles in the past two years from Calgary's EBSCO databases were covered, along with 100 percent of both their JSTOR and OCLC top 50 titles. Panelists were able to address a dozen or more questions during the live event, offering real-time answers to how web-scale discovery is changing search at their institutions.

This webcast is archived and available for on-demand viewing at any time at www.libraryjournal.com/summonserviceinreallife.