Summon and Resource Discovery at the NCSU Libraries Greg Raschke, Associate Director for Collections and Scholarly Communication Josh Boyer, Associate Head, Distance Learning and Research & Information Services ASERL Webinar, February 25, 2011 1

Overview Selection Implementation Demo Post-implementation Analysis 2

Context and Selection Beautiful house – needed a kitchen Sat out federated search era – moved on web-scale API Ease of entry for undergraduates E-books Interdisciplinary research possibilities Anticipating future enhancements for young technology We had QuickSearch, and it needed an articles component. That component needed to show article results WITHOUT requiring patron authentication. To solve the “find articles” problem, we needed to settle on one big, multidisciplinary solution. Web-scale technology and Summon looked like a good bet. Ebsco’s Discovery Service was not on the market yet. We sat out the federated search tools era. It was time for us to make a move. Reasons to license Summon from September 2009 report:   The most commonly expressed positive statement about Summon is that it’s a “game changer.” Summon’s size and scope make it, to quote one librarian, “unlike any other tool.” It provides an “easily marketed, convenient starting place for student research,” wrote one staff member. The experience of reference librarians and others shows that researchers have a difficult time knowing where to start – the catalog? one of several hundred databases? In particular the problem of building a website that adequately helps patrons find articles has vexed academic libraries for years. With Summon, we could offer a good starting place and address the “find articles” problem in a serious way. Good application programming interface (API). Summon would make our e-books much more accessible. Summon searches the full text of e-books, not just the metadata. Summon, given its size and scope, promotes the discovery of interdisciplinary resources.

Implementation From investigation to implementation Creative tension around resource discovery Re-engineering site and search Turned our investigation group into an ad-hoc implementation team Creative tension around existing QuickSearch and Endeca offerings Eventually re-designed our entire site to feature re-engineered search Odd to say a library has just re-engineering a site around search, but did not have search to do it before sad to say and competing priorities and communication goals always moved into the picture

Many libraries have used Summon to create a 1-Search environment Many libraries have used Summon to create a 1-Search environment. Here is Oregon State’s. Many do. This was the most popular implementation method of the libraries present at Summon Camp at ALA Midwinter 2011.

East Carolina presents it as 1-Search as well, but with prominent options to get to the catalog and other tools. We have not pursued the “Summon as 1-Search” path for two reasons: 1) We have had since 2005 a homegrown 1-Search style tool called QuickSearch. We wanted to build on that, not replace it. QuickSearch lacked a good articles component, so we used Summon to create an articles component for QuickSearch. 2) We have a good catalog – our Endeca-based interface with facets – that we were reluctant to give up as our primary interface for catalog materials.

Our site, like ECU’s, offers tabs to get to the catalog, and to other tools. Where they have Summon for 1-Search, we have an “All” tab. Our All tab goes to our QuickSearch tool. More on that in a minute.

First, let’s look at the Articles tab. This goes straight to Summon First, let’s look at the Articles tab. This goes straight to Summon. Librarian ask us “Summon is more than articles. It has your catalog in it. So why do you label it “Articles?” Because Summon is mostly articles: 186.5 million of the 189.2 million records in our instance of Summon (as of Feb 16) are articles, or 98.6%. 1.4 million are books, or 0.8%. The “More search options” link goes to a Find Articles page that explains Summon and offers links to other databases.

“All” tab (QuickSearch) Our “All” tab uses the tool we internally call QuickSearch. This homegrown tool shows results aggregated from Summon (labeled “Articles”), the Libraries’ catalog (labeled “Books & Media”), our journal repository, and web site. All the links on this results page take you into the other tools – Summon, the catalog, etc. QuickSearch’s goal is to route traffic to the appropriate tools. The Articles portion of this results screen uses Summon’s API to pull the 1st 3 results from Summon. The programmer who used the API described it as good and easy to use.

“All” tab (QuickSearch) QuickSearch also has an important Best Bets feature. Top 100 search terms. Only 100 Best Bets, yet they account for 8.3% of the clicks on the QuickSearch results page in Fall 2010. (That’s 26,000 clicks!) Best Bets is the killer app of QuickSearch. Best Bets use our local knowledge to make search results meaningful. GIS, for instance, means something specific to our community. Our library has a big collection of GIS data. Patrons search for GIS a lot; it’s the 24th most popular search term. We know what most of those searches are for; they are not looking for books and articles. So the GIS Best Bet is a smart result. Best Bets is something we could not get if we used Summon (or any other discovery service) as our 1-Search solution.

Demo

Post-implementation Analysis

Use of “All” tab (QuickSearch) 8.3% 43.8% 36.4% 2.4% Click share in Fall 2010.

Use of Summon Articles within “All” tab 43.8% Total 19.1% 6% Click share. 4.2% 12.7% 1.8%

Use of Summon

Use of Summon

Use of Summon * Full-text downloads up 17.3% in 2010 against comparable fall semester in 2009 (pattern has been increase though, so correlation rather than causation) * Notably seen increases in use of large sets of content – aggregators such as EBSCO and dominant publisher packages such as IEEE

Future Data transparency – what is inlcuded Enhancing search algorithm Ability to quickly filter results Support interdisciplinary discovery What does Google Scholar+Summon+Web of Science mean for our database portfolio?