The Michigan State University Libraries have selected the Summon® discovery service from ProQuest for implementation at the nation's pioneer land-grant university. The service launched at the beginning of this month with a number of activities planned to educate students and faculty about this new tool.
The Summon service provides a single entry point into nearly all of a library's resources, allowing users to search and navigate a unified list of results drawn from a broad range of content types. Summon also offers a variety of configuration options for faceted searches and filtering results, and helpful options such as content spotlighting and navigating by discipline.
According to Lee Sochay, chair of the library's discovery implementation task force, Summon's ability to display full citations without authentication is a welcome feature because it is consistent with the University's land-grant mission. The Summon discovery service covers most of the library's collections, including resources such as books, e-books, journal and magazine articles, dissertations, and historical newspapers.
The MSU Libraries serve a campus of more than 49,000 students. The collection includes more than 6.4 million volumes, 143,000 serials, and an extensive set of online resources. In 2013, library users downloaded more than 4.3 million full-text articles from the library's databases.
