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

Middlemash - 30 Nov

To be honest I was a little apprehensive about attending Middlemash as I was worried it would be very "techie". But having followed the previous mashed librares event on Twitter earlier this year I was keen to go and find out more. As it turned out I needn't have worried there were a good range of people there, I didn't feel out of my depth and a real range of topics and projects were covered.

The morning started with a series of short talks (slides from some of the presentations are on Slideshare:

SFX/ Metalib Day School - 20 Oct 09

As with last year's day school this was a really interesting and useful day, especially being able to speak to people who actually work on the systems and see what other institutions are doing.

Metasearch through Xerxes (Graham Seaman - RHU)

RHU have implemented Xerxes on top of Metalib to provide a improved user interface following negative feedback from the NSS. Set up had been fairly straightforward - at RHU it was done over one summer and knowledge of PHP and XSLT was needed. No formal feedback from users as yet but informal feedback suggests users like the new interface (and although not promoted the old Metalib interface can still be accessed). I think it's a definite improvement on the current Metalib interface but as someone in the audience pointed out - why are we having to user Xerxes to do this, why don't Ex Libris improve the Metalib interface? You can see the RHU implementation at http://xerxes.rhul.ac.uk/

PTFS Evergreen demo - 1 Oct 09

PTFS Europe are one of a number of companies which provide support for Open Source LMS their key message being ‘you don’t need to do it yourself’. They provide support for both Koha (for small to medium sized libraries) and Evergreen (designed for consortia, scalable, suitable for academic and public libraries). Whilst there are a few UK customers for Koha there is not yet an Evergreen customer (although apparently there is some interest).

PTFS offer support, carry out software development, offer hosting (and prefer this) and apply upgrades/ patches but you retain control and can access server.

Open Source software is not free as there is still a cost of ownership (staff time, resources, infrastructure) but does have lower costs. Financial savings come from:

• No software licensing costs
• Savings on annual maintenance (a rough example was if you are currently paying £30K this would probably reduce to £15K including hosting)
• Lower hosting costs and daily rate for development services (PTFS have lower operating costs as operate a virtual office)

Open Source software allows greater freedom as you can move between vendors, develop as you wish, share and collaborate (e.g. share costs of developments / benefit from others developments). A release little and often approach is taken to updates and patches so bugs can be fixed quickly. Developments can be delivered quickly (for example, a library with Koha wanted to display borrower names next to loans and this took 2 days to deliver).

OS LMS are popular where there is good local support e.g. France, Canada, US, India. OS LMS are currently the biggest source of new LMS installations in the US.

Demo of Evergreen (http://open-ils.org/)
Evergreen does not yet have all the modules expected in an LMS – there is not yet a Acquisitions/ Serials module (although these will be available in the next release in Spring 2010). However, a number of libraries are running it including some US/ Canadian academic libraries (see full list at http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen_libraries ). An ILL module will be developed after the next release. The OPAC had many of the features of the ‘next gen’ OPACs.

The features that are available in the current version are:
OPAC – Google style search syntax / Bookbags (save records) & RSS feeds / customisable skins / book jackets etc / faceting / relevance ranking / FRBRisation / ‘slimpac’ for mobile & accessible view

• Self service
• Cataloguing
• Reporting interface
• Offline circulation
• User and staff interfaces

A demo of the OPAC is available from http://demo.gapines.org/

Slides from the presentations can be seen at http://www.ptfs-europe.com (I have a login for this)