Serials Solutions, a ProQuest business, has announced that its Summon discovery service has been selected by Yale University to improve access to its distinctive collection, including 15 million volumes and information in all media. Yale University Library is the most recent of six Ivy League schools to adopt the Summon service.
The library conducted a thorough review of discovery services to identify a solution that would deliver improved discovery, has comprehensive coverage of its vast collection, increase usage of the library’s resources, and provide flexible and robust customisation capabilities. The Summon service was selected for its ease of customisation, integrity of search results, a unified index architecture and the company’s track record for rapid innovation of new discovery features.
Inherent to the service, the Summon API is used by dozens of libraries in creative and innovative ways. Customization trends among libraries reveal a range of uses with the Summon API – from custom interfaces to integration with open source interfaces to custom landing pages.
Used by more than 600 libraries in more than 40 countries, the Summon service claims to be the first and only discovery service based on a unified index of content, leveraging its unique ‘match and merge’ technology to combine rich metadata and full text from multiple sources to ultimately make items more discoverable. In just three years, the Summon unified index has grown from 200 million items to more than one billion items – with the vast majority of article and book content full-text searchable.
