Presentation by Sue Carter, Ute Manecke and Mari Kermode, London South Bank University from the Summon and Information Literacy event at Queen Mary University, London.
4. Background
• LSBU needed to improve the user search experience for
students and staff.
• Federated search tools were passé – slow return of
results and clunky user front-ends
• LSBU had Encore which first came on the market in 2006
• BUT Encore alone was insufficient to meet the needs of
LSBU’s students and staff – no article level index.
5. Encore at LSBU
Encore’s single
search box, search
facets, and
relevancy ranking
option can be seen
here.
6. LSBU’s requirements for a library discovery tool
• A fresh approach was needed for a library discovery tool
at LSBU.
• LSBU’s requirements were:
• First-class search engine with a single-search box
• Article-level index based on a central index
• One-stop shop for access to e-resources and the ability to
harvest metadata from LSBU’s planned future repository.
• Compatibility with LSBU’s library management system
7. Index-based Discovery Tools
Index-based discovery tools had become popular in the HE
sector at this time (2013).
Two providers were invited to LSBU to give a demonstration:
• Ebsco Discovery Service from Ebsco
• Summon from Proquest
8. Decision Time
• Both Ebsco and Proquest gave good demonstrations.
• Testing – various teams within the Perry Library conducted
standard searches to compare the two products.
• Search terms such as King Lear and articles on hotel
management in Turkey were looked for.
• Both systems performed well in test searches.
• Overall it was felt that Summon was more user-friendly and
had a clearer front-end than Ebsco.
• Summon was selected.
9. Implementation Overview
• Labour-intensive but overall reasonably
straightforward
• Named technical support contact during the
implementation phase
• Proquest responded quickly to queries and
problems
• Number of implementation tasks which
need to be carried out
• Customisation and tailored search
10. Implementation Tasks …1
• ProQuest asked for basic information and configuration data
such as:
• How many records will you initially upload to Summon – it
is initially necessary to send a full copy of your local
catalogue metadata in MARC21 format to Summon
• Which MARC field in your bib records contains the unique
identifier
• Information about the ftp upload process to get records
into Summon
11. Implementation Tasks …2
• Next major task was filling out the content type
mapping and MARC mapping spreadsheets
• Fields from our library management system needed
to be mapped to the Summon index and content
types
• Content type (Summon facets) have a default MARC
field mapping
12. Implementation Tasks …3
• For both the content type and MARC field mapping,
a library can choose to exclude a content type from
mapping or to add additional mapping
• Complex and time-consuming
• You may need to do some tidying up of your
catalogue records as a result of this process, be
warned!
13. Implementation Tasks …4
Summon FTP Process
• Need to send an initial upload of catalogue records
to Proquest
• Libraries need to set up an ongoing upload process
• At the moment, fortnightly updates
• A full copy of our catalogue records are sent
quarterly to Proquest for Summon, to ensure
consistency.
14. Summon Customisation
• Best Bets – but over to Mari on this one
• Database Recommender turned off
• Two search boxes on student portal MyLSBU. A new
Summon/tailored journal articles box alongside our
usual library catalogue.
• Summon tailored search widget was not at that time
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) compliant.
15. Summon Tailored Search …1
• Very concerned that we would not be able to use the Summon
tailored search widget
• Worked with Proquest and with our MyLSBU developers to use a
vanilla version of Summon which could be used with MyLSBU
• After thorough testing, working with LSBU ICT, we were able to use
Summon with MyLSBU and go-live at the same time as the student
portal launched.
• However at that time the tailored search widget was still not SSL
compliant – we had to have the full Summon with no tailored
search.
16. Summon Tailored Search …2
• We decided to call our Summon search box “Find Journal
Articles and More” anyway, as Summon is the best way
to find articles even without a tailored search.
• This story has a happy ending.
• The Summon tailored search widget is now SSL
compliant.
• So in the near future we can finally have our tailored
article search in the library MyLSBU pages.
17. Summon search in MyLSBU
Summon is
behind the
right hand
search box
here
19. Summon testing
• Testing in the ALD team in the summer of
2014
• Worked through exercises and focused on:
• searching different types of resources, i.e. books,
journals, journal articles, DVDs etc.
• by title or by keywords
• filtering searches
• exporting some results
20. Summon testing
• We also thought about
• its name
• default search settings
• order of filtering options
21. Summon testing
Feedback after testing:
• Many issues!
• Catalogue? Summon? Databases?
• Most of these issues were resolved
22. Student training
• First few weeks before it went on the student
portal:
• Some of us showed new students the Summon link
and demonstrated a search
• From November 2014 – August 2015: partly
demonstrated on the student portal
• From September 2015 for the new academic
year: Summon was strategically introduced in
inductions and sometimes in other training
sessions.
23. Student training
• Target audience
• Mainly first-year undergraduates and foundation
students
• When to use it
• As an initial keyword search for journal articles to
see how much there is on a particular subject or
topic
• If used, it should normally be followed on by a
specific database search.
• For citation searching, i.e. to find a particular item.
24. Student training
• Content usually demonstrated
• Main search box
• Results display
• Main filtering options on the left hand side
• Content sometimes demonstrated
• advanced search settings
• Content occasionally demonstrated
• Creating an account and saving search results
26. The Library catalogue
Choosing a database
Looking through the archive
Finding the issue
THE ARTICLE!
Finding a specific journal article
The old way:
27. Find journal articles or more Summon
THE ARTICLE!
Finding a journal article
The new Summon way:
28. Disadvantages of Summon
• Summon not equally useful for
searches in different disciplines
• Filtering to full text
• “Find journal articles and more”!
30. My Role
• Collate feedback (still ongoing!) to create ‘big
picture’ of LSBU user experience with
Summon
• Identify whether concerns need support from
the Systems team or from the Serials team
• (The above point isn’t always obvious to our
users!)
• Create Best Bet entries for databases
31. • High uptake of Summon!
• Several e-journal access queries coming via
Summon discovery route
• Queries coming from both LSBU students & staff
• Information provided by ProQuest helped to
clarify queries from library staff “in-house”
The Good
32. • Skewed search results in Summon vs results
specific databases for identical searches
• Trying to make certain features do something
they’re not designed to do
The Not so Good
33. Best Bet Results
• Forced to select one database for each
subject area, not great for discovery!
34. • Testing problems to differentiate between
a Summon problem and an e-resource
problem
• Created “ticket” spreadsheet to assist
with this….
Currently
35.
36. • Move to a truly tailored article search
• Make greater use of statistics to inform
Summon settings
• Happy with Summon, but continue to
keep abreast of other discovery tools to
ensure that Summon is the best fit for
LSBU
Summon Future …
This was then taken on board and most of these issues were rectified.
Feedback:
Full text filter is not working
Database recommendations not always helpful
Results displaying in random date order
Difficulties finding DVD titles
DVDs coming up as books
Not finding some resources
Links to full text articles not always working
Summon going live: The idea initially was that Summon would be added to our LSBU library page at the beginning of the autumn term. This was then delayed a few times due to internal restructuring and it was finally rolled out at the beginning of November 2014 when our student inductions and training had already been done.
Demonstration of Summon during the induction period, before it went live, was done by some of us: This was in order to give students a taster of Summon so that they knew what it was for and could perform a search once it appeared on the website. This version had already undergone quite a few amendments based on the testing feedback we had provided.
The fact that Summon couldn’t be introduced properly for the inductions meant however that many students didn’t know about it, how it worked and when they should use it from November onwards.
Again, some of us did introduce it – this time the live version – between November 2014 and August 2015 in the training sessions that did still take place during that academic year. However, not all of us did that so it was inconsistently used in training sessions.
From the beginning of this academic year: Systematic introduction in inductions and training sessions by all of us. Us advisers had an initial meeting before the start of term to compare how we have used Summon so far and to discuss how we want to use it from now on in our training sessions.
We discussed what exactly we want to say about Summon and what aspects we want to show. We were also discussing our intended audience.
Content demonstrated.
Explain what main search box is and does: search box part of our discovery tool, Summon, that searches across most of our LSBU resources.
Mention main filtering options when results are displayed, i.e. full text, journals (publication type) and date range.
Advanced search settings to be able to search in a particular field.
Benefit: students don’t need much search experience or do not need to know much about search tips and skills to use Summon and will still get some journal articles. In this way, Summon has achieved greater accessibility to journal articles especially for novice searchers. Before we had Summon, students were obliged to go to (a) specific database(s) and implement a well-planned search if they wanted to search for a topic. For citation searching, i.e. looking for a particular journal article, the following route had to be taken:
Problems: Different disciplines: Not always ideal to use in Law. For articles from Westlaw, Summon links through to the main search screen in the database so you have to search in the database again. For articles from Lexis, it links you to the journal and then you have to search in there to find the articles. In this way, extra layers are added instead of making the search simpler. Lexis and Westlaw are important in law, as they are written by experts in the field who are practitioners rather than by academics who do not necessarily practise law. Case studies will thus not come up directly on Summon.
In finance, the financial reports will not be searched either.
Searches are more successful with regards to the resources it searches in health and the social sciences.
Filtering to full-text: You sometimes have exactly the same number of results when you do a filtered and when you do an unfiltered search. Full-text links for the filtered search results then do not always link to full text.
Name: Our Summon search box just says ‘find journal articles and more’ but makes no reference to Summon. We decided to just use these words as students then at least learn what to use it for. This inconsistency of mentioning Summon in training but not on the webpage remains though at the moment and we might change that.
Was hired during middle of Summon implementation; had just completed data migration project at previous employer so already in the mindset for potential teething problems; wanted to do what I could to help things go as smoothly as possible.
E-journal access problems typically to do with usual suspects: service provider being down or authentication concerns, rarely to do with Summon itself
Using indexing information provided by ProQuest allowed me to give answers to colleagues without having to wait for a response from Proquest CS and also helped to better formulate any helpdesk tickets I submitted
Probably trying to make it do something it wasn’t designed to do but allowing library staff to identify their own key resources to push to the top manually would be nice.