Summon is Serials Solutions’ web scale discovery tool. I think so far, it looks pretty good. It has all the things you’d want these days in your searches including:
- sidebar with different options to refine search
- clean, easy to use interface
- save citations to folder and export
- advance search, including ISBN for books
Currently, all records in the catalogue, institutional repository, and journal articles have been included. There’s also a locations refinement category to refine to a specific branch for catalogue materials.
It’ll be interesting to see what our users (including staff) think.
Quick Edit/Add-on: Seems like the major criticism I’ve heard is that it does not do known-item (that is you know what you’re looking for) searches well, but as my supervisor has explained, that’s not the purpose of a discovery tool. If you want to looking for something you know in a library, you use the source that will help you look for that. Some people might say “but look at google, it can do both well”, but even google scholar is unlikely to give you a book if you only enter a couple of words when you’re looking for a book (obviously that’s not true in all cases).
Learning (Lib)Tech 