The December 2009 issue of Information Technology and Libraries 28(4) has a slew of articles around discovery systems, all written by librarians from UNLV. I'm hoping to read them over vacation, but no promises. I did read Information Discovery Insights Gained from MultiPAC, a Prototype Library Discovery System by Alex A. Dolski and found it resonated with my experience so far with Summon. Apparently I'm not alone, as Jeffrey Beall highlighted some of the same issues. This is what I've experienced at the U of Calgary, summed up in one sentence:
"Despite the best intentions of everyone involved with its creation and maintenance, and despite the high quality of many of our metadata records when examined in isolation, in the big picture, MultiPAC has demonstrated – perhaps for the first time – how much work will be needed to upgrade our metadata for a discovery system."
I'm really looking forward to the New Year to see how many metadata hurdles we can clear to make Summon a great product for our users.