Ex Libris Summon Release Improves the Research Experience and Supports Librarians’ Decision-Making Processes
CHICAGO, IL, January 21, 2017 – Ex Libris®, a ProQuest company, is pleased to announce that a new release of the Summon® discovery service will help libraries improve the user experience and will provide usage insights to support libraries’ decision-making processes. Patrons will benefit from enhanced search and ranking technologies, exposure to more relevant databases, and greater opportunities for serendipitous discovery as the result of expanded subject headings.
All Summon customers, regardless of whether they use the standard Summon search interface or an API, will immediately benefit from the boosting of subject terms via a new relevance algorithm which improves the results of broad-topic searches while preserving performance for known-item searches. In addition, by leveraging the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), Summon will display more suggestions for expanding query terms. The new Summon release will also offer additional relevant databases in the database recommender. Enhanced exploration will be made available through improved phrase matching within the Topic Explorer feature. Using the Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) analytics platform, librarians will now be able to conduct query, user, and technical analyses with ease.
Summon customers were a vital part of the development process, contributing ideas and suggestions for improvements. In addition, the ELUNA/IGeLU Summon Product Working Group provided substantial assistance in evaluating relevance-ranking enhancements and establishing a preview environment that enabled customers to test features prior to release.
“Following on the many improvements we made in 2016, this release represents, once again, the Ex Libris commitment to the continuous enhancement of Summon to meet the diverse needs of students, faculty members, and librarians,” commented Shlomi Kringel, Ex Libris corporate vice president of discovery and delivery solutions. “I would also like to thank the Summon Product Working Group for their valuable contribution and look forward to continuing our strong partnership in 2017.”
About Ex Libris
Ex Libris, a ProQuest company, is a leading global provider of cloud-based solutions for higher education. Offering SaaS solutions for the management and discovery of the full spectrum of library and scholarly materials, as well as mobile campus solutions driving student engagement and success, Ex Libris serves thousands of customers in 90 countries. For more information about Ex Libris, see our website, and join us on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
About ProQuest (http://www.proquest.com)
ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company’s products are a gateway to the world’s knowledge including dissertations, governmental and cultural archives, news, historical collections and ebooks. ProQuest technologies serve users across the critical points in research, helping them discover, access, share, create and manage information.
The company’s cloud-based technologies offer flexible solutions for librarians, students and researchers through the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Coutts® information services, Dialog®, ebrary®, EBL™, and SIPX® businesses – and notable research tools such as the Summon® discovery service, the RefWorks® citation and reference management platform, MyiLibrary® ebook platform, the Pivot® research development tool and Intota™. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.