Columbia University Chooses Serials Solutions’ Summon™ Discovery Service to Address Critical Library Search Needs
Aug. 10, 2010 - Seattle - Serials Solutions, the industry leader in providing libraries with digital discovery tools and integrated management solutions, announced today that the Columbia University Libraries have chosen to adopt its Summon™ Web-scale discovery service to address what studies have shown is a fundamental barrier between libraries and users: the lack of an easy and fast starting point for research.
“Over half over our acquisitions budget is spent on e-resources, so it is important that people can easily discover them,” said Robert Wolven, associate university librarian for bibliographic services and collection development. “We found that Summon offered us an effective solution for one of our users’ biggest problems – choosing where to begin their research. Summon will provide our users with an easy-to-use platform to begin their searches; it is easy to understand and easy for our organization to implement.”
The Columbia University Libraries selected the Summon™ discovery service after careful consideration of many different tools as well as a close examination of the user experience. In 2009, the Columbia University Libraries conducted a survey about the quality of its library resources, among other service quality factors. “Faculty and graduate student users perceived that our e-resources were lacking and not easy enough to navigate. This was surprising to us because we have one of the highest e-resource budgets among academic and research libraries,” said Wolven. “We determined we needed a better way for users to find all of the content we were licensing.”
“We’re pleased that a venerated university such as Columbia has embraced Summon,” said John Law, vice president discovery services with Serials Solutions. “We’ve taken great pride in the development and rapid adoption of Summon. It’s the enthusiastic participation of librarians and the industry’s leading content providers, combined with Serials Solutions’ unique expertise that has enabled a new level of library search capability.”
One of the key attributes that differentiates the Summon™ service from other discovery solutions is that it is the only solution that has a comprehensive single unified index that enables sub-second searches. The Summon™ service goes beyond federated search and leap-frogs next-generation catalogs by providing one search box, one results screen and access to the breadth of library content. Results from a Summon™ search are content neutral, based only on relevancy and never impacted by it’s provider’s technological expertise.
The Summon™ service enables a familiar Web-searching experience of the full breadth of content found in library collections – from books and videos to e-resources such as articles. It aims to bring researchers back to library content and resources by providing a premiere and easy-to-use discovery tool. Librarians like the service’s power to transform their institution’s search experience, and have found it easy to set up and integrate into their current library operations.
About Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York, one of the top academic and research institutions in the world, includes three undergraduate schools, 13 graduate and professional schools, and a school of continuing education. Its libraries house over 10 million volumes, over 100,000 current journals and serials, and an extensive collection of electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms, and other non-print formats. It is ranked as one of the top five library systems in the nation. To learn more about the Columbia University Libraries’ rich collections, services, and expertise, please visit http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/
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 3,000 libraries of all sizes and types. Serials Solutions’ comprehensive suite of discovery tools and management services helps improve access to and use of collections, eases librarian workloads, and ultimately reduces operating costs. Solutions include: 360, the only complete and integrated e-resource access and management solution; KnowledgeWorks, the authoritative e-resource knowledgebase and foundation for Serials Solutions 360; Ulrich’s, the world’s most authoritative source of bibliographic and publisher information for serials and the most comprehensive source of print and electronic serials data available; AquaBrowser®, a discovery layer that makes navigation more accessible; and most recently the Summon™ Web-scale discovery service, a world-class tool that provides instant access to the full breadth of the library’s collection through a single search.
Serials Solutions is a business unit of ProQuest LLC.