The Summon™ Service Goes Open Beta in Europe
July 6, 2009 (SEATTLE) – The University of Liverpool Library launches to the public today an open beta of the Summon™ web-scale discovery service, a groundbreaking instant search of the full breadth of the content found in its library collections. In addition to the librarians who have already been testing it actively, the Summon™ service is now being used by students and faculty to search the holdings of the library – physical and digital – from a single search box. The University of Liverpool Library is the first European open beta site for this service and only the second public instance in the world behind Dartmouth College Library which just opened its beta site to the public in June. The Summon™ service has been developed by Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest.
“University of Liverpool Library strives to be at the forefront of the delivery of electronic resources,” said Phil Sykes, University Librarian at the University of Liverpool. “It’s giving useful results already for many subjects, so we felt we should share the experience with the University community. It’s also a great opportunity to make our library users feel involved in the development of the service and to provide feedback to the Summon team based on real usage.”
The Summon™ Service has been in beta for six months and will be available commercially later this month. Research shows that the absence of a simple, obvious starting point for research is a fundamental barrier between libraries and users. This web-scale discovery service overcomes that obstacle: users enter a search term in a library-branded search box and the Summon™ service instantly conducts a single search against pre-harvested content, enabling true relevancy-ranked results in one integrated list. The service provides simplicity for users and exposes the breadth of the library’s content, allowing more resources to be discovered.
The Summon™ service has been developed in close cooperation with its library beta sites—partners in the service’s mission to bring the researcher back to the library and provide a channel for greater return on the library’s content investment. In addition to University of Liverpool and Dartmouth College, sites include Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney, Claremont Colleges Library, University of Calgary, and Western Michigan University.
Publishers and other contributors play a key role in the development of the Summon™ service’s single index of content. In addition to key partners ProQuest and Gale – aggregators representing 4700 publishers—participants include Springer, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, IEEE, Emerald, Scitation publishers, the Royal Society, scores of scholarly publishers and university presses, and more.
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™ unified discovery service, a revolutionary discovery 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 Ulrichs™ Global Serials Intelligence and represents the AquaBrowser Library® unified discovery interface in the academic market in North America. 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. For more information, please visit www.serialssolutions.com or call 1-866-SERIALS.
Serials Solutions is a division of ProQuest LLC.
About the University of Liverpool
The University of Liverpool is a member of the Russell Group of leading research-intensive institutions in the UK. It attracts collaborative and contract research commissions from a wide range of national and international organisations valued at more than £93 million annually.