Got a press release from SerialsSolutions yesterday about a new product they're announcing – Summon Unified Discovery Service. A list of features can be found here. Sounds an awful lot like their current Federated Search product, 360 Search; I wonder if this product is the result of their acquisition of WebFeat early last year?
From their press release:
Information retrieval is light years ahead– and yet, we still have barriers. Library
collections continue to intimidate users – a problem that’s compounded by the lure of easy searching on the open Web. Today’s users see all information as the same. They go to Google for everything and often spend too much time finding what they need or can’t find what they are looking for at all.
But, today we’re removing those barriers. Today, we’re making library collections as easily searched as Google makes the worldwide web. I’m so proud to introduce to you a new service that allows researchers to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content. Through one simple search, patrons can find instant access to the breadth of authoritative content that’s the hallmark of great libraries – digital and print, audio and video, single articles to entire e-journals, and every format in between.The Serials Solutions Summon™ unified discovery service is a leap forward that furthers our mission of helping libraries be the best partner for research. It’s simple, easy and fast – and made for libraries.
We are previewing the Serials Solutions Summon™ service this week at ALIA Information Online in Sydney, later this week at ALA Midwinter in Denver, next week at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference in Toronto, and in two weeks at the 9th Annual Bielefeld Conference in Bielefeld, Germany.
If you see it in action at any of these conferences, would you post your impressions as a comment?
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3 Responses to “SerialsSolutions Summon”
Mike Buschman, Senior Product Manager at Serials Solutions, emailed me the following, with permission to post:
I saw your post regarding the Serials Solutions Summon™ service, and I assure you that it is a completely new service that is independent of WebFeat or 360 Search. It is not a federated search—we are pre-harvesting content on a large-scale (really large scale) from publishers, aggregators, and database providers, and then allowing searching for libraries using their knowledge bases to identify the content to which they subscribe (plus their OPAC content and open access content). Furthermore, we use the library’s OpenURL resolver to provide access to the appropriate (for them) copies.
Jenny Levine has a transcription from the Summon presentation at ALA Midwinter
EBSCOhost Debuting Discovery Service, Aims at One-Stop Search Interface
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