III have released Encore Synergy which provides access to articles as well as the existing catalogue functionality. It differs from Summon, EDS etc on that it doesn't use a harvested index to provide article results but instead uses web services to dynamically generate the results from the content providers. It also doesn't interfile the article results but presents a small set in the initial results list, with links to more.
Marshall Breeding has given a write up and a few early adopters are already using Encore Synergy including the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Showing posts with label opac. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opac. Show all posts
Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Summon @ Huddersfield and Northumbria
Huddersfield and Northumbria are working on a JISC project to do with their implementations of Summon. Yesterday they held a workshop to share their experiences so far - some notes are available here. Interested to see that both institutions seem to be replacing their federated search with Summon - I'd thought you'd still need both.
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Visit to Huddersfield Uni - 28th Feb 2010
Angela and myself took a trip across the Pennines to visit Dave Pattern at the University of Huddersfield. The main purpose of the trip was to look at developments on their OPAC but we also talked Summon and repositories.
Dave's added lots of enhancements to their OPAC (Horizon, Sirsi Dynix):
Keyword search tag cloud - on the front page of the OPAC. Shows most popular search terms - very popular at the start of term.
Keyword suggestions - suggestions of other related keywords to include in your search
Stats available to staff - restricted by IP range staff can see loan statistics for the book they are looking at in the catalogue.
People who borrowed this also borrowed.... - following the introduction of this a bigger range of stock has been borrowed, more books have been borrowed and people are renewing less often
Other editions - uses data from Library Thing
Virtual Shelf browse - most popular feature - let's you browse the shelf (by classmark) from the OPAC
Dave's added lots of enhancements to their OPAC (Horizon, Sirsi Dynix):
Keyword search tag cloud - on the front page of the OPAC. Shows most popular search terms - very popular at the start of term.
Keyword suggestions - suggestions of other related keywords to include in your search
Stats available to staff - restricted by IP range staff can see loan statistics for the book they are looking at in the catalogue.
People who borrowed this also borrowed.... - following the introduction of this a bigger range of stock has been borrowed, more books have been borrowed and people are renewing less often
Other editions - uses data from Library Thing
Virtual Shelf browse - most popular feature - let's you browse the shelf (by classmark) from the OPAC
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
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).
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).
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