Serials Solutions, the e-resource access and management services arm of ProQuest, US, has added University of Calgary as a beta development partner for the Summon unified discovery service. Several new content providers, including BMJ, an international peer-reviewed medical journal and subsidiary of the British Medical Association, have also signed onto the Summon service. BMJ joins nearly 100 content providers along with key partners ProQuest and Gale - aggregators representing more than 4,700 publishers.
The Summon service addresses what research shows is a fundamental barrier between libraries and users: a simple, obvious starting point for searches. The service is being developed in close cooperation with library beta partners, with a goal of not only bringing the researcher back to the library, but providing a channel for greater return on the library's content investment.
The role of the beta partners is to ensure the service is tracking against those goals, providing feedback from the field. Librarians, archivists and curators at the University of Calgary will initially test and use the Summon service. They will then move it to an open beta in May, getting feedback from faculty and student users. Other partners who are already testing include Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney, University of Liverpool and Western Michigan University.
The Summon service produces fast, relevancy-ranked, results through a single search against pre-harvested content. While the aggregated databases of ProQuest and Gale form a cornerstone for the Summon service's content, new contributors are consistently being added to provide the most accurate reflection of the breadth of content available in any library - whether print or electronic.
The Summon unified discovery service will move from beta to commercial launch in July 2009. The hosted service is built with an open API that will allow it to be used with existing library Web sites, next-generation catalogues or campus systems with low impact on staff.
