E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) provider Serials Solutions, US, has announced that the University of Michigan (U-M) has chosen the Summon web-scale discovery service to make searching its library collections effective, fast and easy. More than 50,000 students and faculty at all three of its campuses, which encompass more than a dozen libraries, will benefit from the Summon service.
U-M is one of many top-ranked institutions selecting the Summon service to create a familiar web searching experience for users, enabling access to the breadth of the libraries' collections from a single search box. The Summon service is provided by Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest.
U-M formed the Article Discovery Working Group to evaluate a variety of discovery tools, including Google Scholar and the Summon service. The team analysed 'personas' - personality profiles of typical users - to understand the article discovery needs of U-M's users. The working group bolstered the analysis with expert reviews of the University's three campus systems and then broadly surveyed its community, asking users to rank the importance they place on particular functions and features. The team found that researchers were passionate about the value of articles in scholarly databases, but wanted to access them in a more familiar way, such as through a single search box. Ultimately, the findings led them to the Summon service.
The Summon service was built from scratch using a technology architecture that's entirely new for libraries. At its core is a comprehensive single index that enables sub-second searches and results that are 'content neutral', based only on relevancy and never impacted by their provider's technological prowess.
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