E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, celebrated the first anniversary of its Summon web-scale discovery service market launch by announcing the latest in a series of new features being added over recent months. New local language interfaces now support Japanese, Chinese and Western European languages and are expected to fuel further international growth. Also, users will get even more research help in their results set with database recommendations and ‘cited by’ counts from ISI Web of Science.
The Summon service captured the library market’s attention when it announced that it could create a simple entry to the breadth of a library’s collection. Integrating all formats – including e-resources at the article level – in a single search box, the service creates a search experience with the familiarity of those found on the Open Web. Now in use at dozens of universities across three continents, the Summon service continues to be the only available web-scale discovery service, according to the company. Built from the ground-up and based on extensive end-user research, the service’s every element was designed to bring students and faculty back to the library as the starting point for research, rather than the Open Web.
At the core of the Summon service is a mega-index that pre-harvests content in a rapid, multi-threaded ingest process. Launched with key partners ProQuest, Gale and 40 other publishers, the service’s content providers list now exceeds 6,000 and includes Ingram Digital, LexisNexis, IngentaConnect, ThomsonReuters, ABC-CLIO, Springer, Taylor& Francis, MLA, SAGE and thousands of others. Half a billion records have been indexed from nearly 100,000 journals.
The Summon service’s comprehensive coverage has been a key consideration for libraries evaluating the service. Grand Valley State University, the first Summon site to go live – compared the Summon list of covered titles with actual usage of the library’s subscribed content. Results revealed an average of more than 99 percent coverage.
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