Yale University selected the Summon discovery service from Serials Solutions®, a ProQuest® business, to improve access to its distinctive collection, including 15 million volumes and information in all media. Yale University Library, the most recent of six Ivy League schools to adopt the Summon service, determined ease of customization, integrity of search results, a unified index architecture and the company’s track record for rapid innovation of new discovery features were essential in choosing to work with Serials Solutions.
The library conducted a thorough review of discovery services to identify a solution that would deliver improved discovery, has comprehensive coverage of its vast collection, increase usage of the library’s resources, and provide flexible and robust customization capabilities.
“As one of the world’s leading research libraries, providing easy access to our vast collection of resources is very important,” said Michael Dula, chief technology officer, Yale University Library. “The Summon API will enable us to create a more tailored user experience, customized interface, and connect our users to relevant content. While we carefully evaluated a number of services, Summon was the most obvious choice based on the ease-of-use and flexibility of the API, and the new features in Summon 2.0.”
Inherent to the service, the Summon API is used by dozens of libraries in creative and innovative ways. Customization trends among libraries reveal a range of uses with the Summon API – from custom interfaces to integration with open source interfaces to custom landing pages.
“We recognize the importance of providing libraries and librarians the opportunity to directly impact the discovery experience,” said John Law, vice president, discovery services, Serials Solutions. “In response to ever-changing user behaviors and the desire by libraries to provide more services that deliver greater value to researchers, the Summon service combines comprehensiveness with the flexibility to customize the user interface, and innovative features that allow libraries to offer layers of contextual guidance for users at the point they need it most.”
Used by more than 600 libraries in more than 40 countries, the Summon service is the first and only discovery service based on a unified index of content, leveraging its unique “match and merge” technology to combine rich metadata and full text from multiple sources to ultimately make items more discoverable. In just three years, the Summon unified index has grown from 200 million items to more than one billion items – with the vast majority of article and book content full-text searchable. Proven to increase usage of library resources, the Summon service consistently meets user expectations by delivering innovative new features for enhancing discovery.
