Summon Demo

Myself and Angela went to a demo of Summon last week. Whilst Serials Solutions were there, the majority of the presentation was given by Liverpool Uni who gave a fairly 'warts and all' talk about their experience with Summon (which they have been beta testing).

The big difference between Summon (and others like Ebsco Discovery Service) and the other next generation OPACs is that Summon harvests and indexes content so that searching is much quicker, getting rid of the waiting familiar to users of federated search tools. You can search across the catalogue and other sources such as databases from a single search box. Features found in other search and discovery tools were available, such as facets and  book jackets.

For electronic resources you can restrict the results only to those resources you subscribe to but also add in results from outside your subscriptions which are contained within the Summon index. You can also link to the full text - rather than being hosted on Summon you use the link resolver to link to the full text.

Feedback from users has been that the system is intuitive and easy to use. However, as it seems to be with every system, Summon isn't perfect. Liverpool highlighted some of the issues they'd come across:
- No de-duplication of results so in the example shown, there were 5 records for one book.
- Results from databases don't show where they've come from so it's not possible for users to find a relevant database and go off and search it in more detail.
- Gaps in the coverage of content - not all databases are indexed (and it's very unlikely they ever will be) but it's not always clear which one's are so you can't tell users exactly what they are searching. There's currently no way to link to a federated search tool to address these gaps.
- Testing has shown that indexing of content isn't always up to date, for example, some journals were a few issues behind so users can't find current articles.

But despite these issues Summon does seem to be a step in the right direction - offering fast searching across (nearly) all our resources from one search box. The interface is clean, attractive and easy to use and using the facets to drill down into the results seems to work smoothly.

Liverpool Uni's Summon can be freely accessed at http://www.liv.ac.uk/Library/e-library/summon.html (although they thought they would put it behind their proxy once they fully released it).

ECHO360

Was invited to a demo of ECHO360 as part of the pilot at Salford University. ECHO360 is a lecture capture software that can be set up to automatically put links to relevant content into particular programme / modules on Blackboard.

It records audio, video and the sides being used. The user can move between view and request relevant programmes as part of an RSS feed.

In addition to using this software in it's traditional way it is also being used in really interesting ways such as to provide feedback to students while marking assignment or even being used by students to present assignments.

Anna