NC State University Chooses Summon™ Service to Eliminate Information Silos, Improve Results
December 9, 2009 (SEATTLE) – The Summon™ web-scale discovery service is being adopted as the standard by more and more libraries around the world as it closes its first calendar year of boosting academic research. The latest addition is at North Carolina State University (NCSU), where nearly 40,000 students and faculty will be able to search the breadth of the libraries’ collections – both physical and digital—from a single search box. Other recent adoptions include University of Texas (San Antonio), University of Missouri (Kansas City), University of Manitoba, National College of Ireland, University of London, University of Adelaide, VTT Research Institute in Finland and dozens of others around the world. The Summon™ service is from Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest.
“We feel Summon is the best solution to date to address the ‘find articles’ problem, especially for undergrads. They have quickest needs, the tightest deadlines, and the biggest hurdles in understanding how to get at the right resources for their assignments,” said Greg Rashke, Associate Director for Collections and Scholarly Communication, NCSU Libraries. “Summon cuts down silos of information and that makes it extremely promising for our needs.”
The Summon™ service is driven by entirely new technology that delivers a search experience that rivals those found on the Open Web. With its web-scale architecture, it can handle massive amounts of content and usage reliably and with speed. In fact, recent tests proved that the Summon™ service’s remarkably fast response times will meet the expectations of users who have grown accustomed to the pace of services from consumer companies such as Amazon and Google. End users also like the Summon™ service’s clean, modern interface, while libraries value that it’s built on open-source technologies. Further, the Summon™ service’s integrated rights management enables search and availability to be customized to their collections.
Participation of publishers and other content providers continues to rapidly expand as well. Well over 6,000 publishers are represented in the Summon™ service’s index of a half-billion records from nearly 100,000 journals – double the number of journals available at the service’s commercial launch in July. Recent additions include not only a variety of academic presses such as Princeton University Press, but international market reports and research from such information groups as UK-based “Superbrand” Mintel. Their publications are indexed using the Summon™ service’s rapid multi-threaded ingest process. The unique method allows new content to be added almost instantly, enabling comprehensiveness and ensuring currency.
Pronounced by Online magazine as having “the potential to change how end users perceive the searching of library materials,” the Summon™ service can transform a library’s search experience in a proven, six-week set-up. The service provides simplicity and portability (with a new mobile interface) 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.
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 Ulrichsweb.com™ and Ulrich’s Serials Analysis System™ worldwide, and represents the AquaBrowser Library® unified discovery interface in the academic market in North America.
Serials Solutions provides fast implementation, easy customization, and outstanding value to libraries throughout the world.
Serials Solutions is a business unit of ProQuest LLC.