ABC-CLIO Newest Partner to the Summon™ Web-Scale Discovery Service
Researchers all over the world will now be finding the award-winning content of reference leader ABC-CLIO through the new Summon™ web-scale discovery service from Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest. The Summon™ service is a pioneer in providing instant searching of library collections – from books and videos to e-resources at the article level, integrated and accessible from a single search box. ABC-CLIO is part of a burgeoning movement of publishers who are choosing to make their content more discoverable to students and faculty via this groundbreaking service. With other recent additions M.E. Sharpe, Knovel, IBIS, and Duke University Press, the Summon™ service now harvests content from more than 6,000 providers, more than 50,000 journals and contains nearly half a billion records.
“At ABC-CLIO, we are excited to be partnering with Serials Solutions on its new Summon service,” said Becky Snyder, President of ABC-CLIO. “Making our diverse, quality content easily accessible to the widest audience of students and faculty possible is an ongoing goal for us. Working with the Summon service is a great way to achieve that goal, and a perfect match for our needs as well as users’ needs in academic libraries.”
The Summon™ Service launched worldwide beta testing in January with key content providers ProQuest and Gale and key contributors such as Springer, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE. Since then, the program has continued to accelerate with major publishing additions such as LexisNexis®, Publishing Technology – provider of the scholarly research platform IngentaConnect™ – ThomsonReuters ISI Web of Science®, IEEE, Emerald, Scitation publishers, the Royal Society, scores of scholarly publishers and university presses, and more. The service is now available commercially and has been adopted by universities on three continents.
Grand Valley State University Library, the first commercial adopter of the Summon™ service, tested the service’s content to ensure the service thoroughly represented the library’s collection. Ron Berry, the library’s Director of Technology and Information Resources looked at the library’s top 100 downloaded titles from Academic Search Premier and compared them against the Summon™ list of content. The results: 99% coverage. He then compared the top 50 JSTOR titles and top 50 titles from its OCLC databases. “In both cases all of the titles were indexed in Summon. This was compelling evidence to the power of a unified index and the ease of which our users could gain access to core academic titles,” says Mr. Berry. “I’m absolutely confident that we are providing access to the breadth of our collection. All it takes is five minutes of searching to see how many of our licensed resources are being utilized in the Summon result sets.”
The Summon™ service is built with all-new technology aimed at addressing a fundamental barrier between libraries and users: the lack of a simple, obvious starting point for library research. This web-scale discovery service overcomes that obstacle, by allowing users to enter a search term in a library-branded search box, triggering an instant single search against its massive content store and the library’s local catalog. It then rapidly delivers relevancy-ranked results in one integrated list. The Summon™ service provides simplicity for users and exposes the breadth of the library’s content, allowing more resources to be discovered – a boon for libraries, who want to get more from collection investments, and publishers, who want to drive greater usage.
The Summon™ web-scale discovery service is hosted by Serials Solutions.
About Serials Solutions
Founded by a librarian for librarians in 2000, Serials Solutions is the global leader in E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) that serves more than 2,000 libraries of all sizes and types. Serials Solutions® KnowledgeWorks, the authoritative e-resource knowledgebase, is the foundation for Serials Solutions® 360, the only complete and integrated e-resource access and management solution. Serials Solutions recently introduced the Summon™ web-scale discovery service, a revolutionary tool that provides instant access to the full breadth of the library’s collection through a single search.
Serials Solutions also is the exclusive source for Ulrichsweb.com™ and Ulrich’s Serials Analysis System™ worldwide, and represents the AquaBrowser® Discovery Layer in the academic market in North America and Australia. The WebFeat® federated search service recently acquired by ProQuest soon will be incorporated into the Serials Solutions family of access and discovery services.
Serials Solutions provides fast implementation, easy customization, and outstanding value to libraries throughout the world.
Serials Solutions is a division of ProQuest LLC.
About ProQuest LLC
ProQuest creates specialized information resources and technologies that propel successful research and lifelong learning. A global leader in serving libraries of all types, ProQuest offers the culmination of experience from many respected brands, including CSA™, UMI®, Chadwyck-Healey™, SIRS®, and eLibrary®. With Serials Solutions®, Ulrich’s™, RefWorks®, COS™, and Dialog® brands now in the ProQuest family, the company continues to build on its legacy of responsive people in partnership with librarians.
ProQuest consistently seeks new ways to support researchers and quality research. More than a content provider or aggregator, ProQuest is an information partner, creating indispensable research solutions that connect people and information. Through innovative, user-centered technology, ProQuest offers a depth and breadth of global content that includes historical newspapers, dissertations, and uniquely relevant resources for researchers of any age and sophistication—including content not likely to be digitized by others. Inspired by its customers and end users, ProQuest is working toward a future that blends information accessibility with community to further enhance learning and encourage lifelong enrichment. For more information, visit www.proquest.com or the ProQuest parent company website, www.cambridgeinformationgroup.com.