SUMMON AND THE ART OF DISCOVERYChristopher C. Brown

University of Denver, Penrose Library

Sept. 14, 2012

QUESTIONS I AM ASKED

Why doesn’t your library have any books on my topic?

Why does Google / Google Scholar / Google Books have so much on my topic, but your library has so little?

THE INFORMATION ACCESS ANOMALY

  Book (average) Journal Article (average)

Google (Scholar/Books)

Typical Length - full text (FT)

200 pages x 400 = 80,000 words

15 pages x 400 = 6,000 words

Surrogate Record (SR)

50-100 words (75 ave.)

300-500 words (400 ave. 1)

SR to FT ratio 1 to 10,666 1 to 15 1 to 1

1  http://www.writersservices.com/wps/p_word_count.htm 

What this chart means: even though University of Denver owns over 1.5 million books, students have the feeling that we don’t own any books on their topics.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

c. 1900 – 2000s Card catalog access Lookups by left-anchored terms, no keyword searching for books

1990s – 2000s Online catalog access Lookups of catalog records by keywords anywhere in author, title, subject or notes fields

Now Discovery tools Lookups possible in some cases by words anywhere in full text of work

THINKING ABOUT SEARCH MODELS

SHIFT IN TERMS

What I call “broadcast searching” vendors typically call “federated searching.” Actually it is not federated searching at all. It is broadcast searching with a federation of results.

When the true “federated searching” came about, vendors could not call it that, since they already used that term for the less-powerful broadcast searching. Thus they generally refer to this as “Web-scale discovery”, or simply “Discovery.”

Indexing: title, author, keywords, abstract

Full text of content – Every last word

Trade Journals

Magazines Scholarly JournalsDissertations

Discovery Tools

GoogleScholar

Surface Searching

Deep Searching

NewspaperseBooksPrint Books

PRODUCTS AND THEIR VENDORS

Summon – Serials Solutions (http://www.serialssolutions.com/en/services/summon/)

EDS – Ebsco (http://www.ebscohost.com/discovery)

Primo Central – ExLibris (http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/PrimoOverview)

UNIQUE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS TRIALSONLY ONE TRIAL STILL ONGOING

http://eresources.loc.gov/search~S9/?searchtype=Y&searcharg=Article+Finder

NEW SITES TO USE

Summon: http://du.summon.serialssolutions.com/

EDS: http://academic.shu.edu/libraries/db/eds/mock-lib-edsbox2.htm;

http://www.libs.uga.edu/

Primo Central: http://eresources.loc.gov/search~S9/?searchtype=Y&searcharg=Article+Finder

DIFFERING PHILOSOPHIES

Summon: no A&I records (with the exception of Web of Science); but recently started adding records for A&I (optional); no broadcast search

EDS: adds A&I records; integrates broadcast search

Primo Central: adds A&I records; integrates broadcast search

Summon does no broadcast searching; everything is in the big pot. The others seem to do a degree of broadcast searching.

RELEVANCE VS. DISCOVERYM

eta

data

Full

Text

Higher Relevance

Higher Discovery

UNIVERSITY OF DENVER SITUATIONENCORE VS. SUMMON

Books / Chapters

Harvested Materials

Articles Sum

mon

Enco

re

Strengths

Strengths

FULL TEXT SEARCH TEST 1 PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE

Armstrong, David, Theresa Marteau, Ann Gosling, and John Weinman. 1997. The place of inter-rater reliability in qualitative research: An empirical study. Sociology 31 (3): 597-606.

teams should produce separate analyses and then resolve any discrepancies, or

Title Present FT Search Success

Summon Yes (1st) Yes (quotes); Yes (quotes)

EDS Yes (7th) No; No

Primo Central Yes (1st) No; No

Google Scholar Yes (1st) No; No

The fourth analyst placed health care needs within a social welfare model

FULL TEXT SEARCH TEST 2PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE

Diamond, Catherine, Sandy Saintonge, Phyllis August, and Adeline Azrack. 2011. The development of building wellness™, a youth health literacy program. Journal of Health Communication 16 Suppl 3 (sup3): 103-18.

Title Present FT Search Success

Summon Yes (1st) No; No

EDS Yes (1st) No; No

Primo Central Yes (1st) No; No

Google Scholar Yes (1st) Yes (1st – needed quotes); Yes (7th)

in their programming. Most staff members were interested in a new healthis achieved through experiential learning with games, activities, and medical guest

FULL TEXT SEARCH 3NEWSPAPER

"Denver Expands Light Rail." The Salt Lake Tribune: A.14. Print. 1997.

Title Present FT Search Success

Summon Yes (1st) Yes (1st); Yes (1st)

EDS Yes (1st) Yes (1st); No

Primo Central No No; No

Google Scholar N/A N/A

Although Denver's light-rail transit system is but 5.3 miles long, ridership exceeds projections and is now averaging well over 15,000 tripsDenver is ready to start construction on an 8.7-mile expansion to the system

FULL TEXT SEARCH 4HATHITRUST PUBLIC DOMAIN

Public libraries : Who should pay the bills? 1978. . United States: .

Title Present FT Search Success

Summon Yes (1st) Yes (1st) – with quotes; Yes (1st) – with quotes

EDS Yes (but not HathiTrust)

No; No

Primo Central Yes (1st) No; No

Library services are in an inferior

purpose create a balanced

"TRUE BUGS HAVE PIERCING-SUCKING MOUTHPARTS"

LOC Summon YESLOC Primo Central NOLOC EDS NO

SOME TESTING

Search Summon EDS Primo Centcats 4,027,430 6,707,127 483,518 public domain 4,138,373 1,699,817 495,399intellectual freedom

1,266,499 868,675 7,472

colorado legislature

324,077 248,362 38,763

Denver light rail 184,142 41,528 10,305business plans 14,515,373 20,741,593 5,076,449

SOME TESTING FOR FT

Search Summon FT EDS FT Primo Cent FTCats 3,007,852 1,514,596 271,449public domain 3,486,754 245,313 99,127intellectual freedom

519,269 579,612 331,410

colorado legislature

170,807 73,045 34,348

Denver light rail 63,300 13,840 9,088business plans 13,251,00

9

6,374,136 4,589,429

WHAT CAN WE CONCLUDE?

Search: states

Total Results FT Results

Summon 79,928,385 77,526,648

EDS 181,905,166 45,928,232

Primo Central

36,788,443 29,748,221

EDS has more A&I sourcesSummon has more FT

Summon allows users to see all available content, but EDS and Primo Central do not. Thus, we need to do a search that pulls up something. For this comparison I searched on the word “states.”

SEARCH COMPARISONSSearch DU Catalog Search Summon Search (limited to

catalog)Google Books

I need information on tango houses and tango fashion in Paris in the 1920's

tango fashion paris 0 results 7,249 results 9,410 results

How can I find out the demographical make up of the opposition to Franco in the Spanish Civil War?

spanish civil war franco opposition 3 results 31,672 results 102,000 results

I'd like to find the percentage of the population that was wealthy during the Great Depression. I'd also like to find out how the wealthy maintained their wealth during this time period.

wealthy population great depression

0 results 70,774 results 1,340,000 results

Any thoughts as to where to look for a good definition of "special needs"?

"special needs" definition 139 results 27,216 322,000 results

SUMMON SECRETS

Blank search box – returns all Summon content. Works for facets as well.

Search beyond your library works very well for full text searching, even for selected books.

Open searching – discovery of other places’ discovery. Follow this pattern: http://xxxxx.summon.serialssolutions.com, where xxxxx is another institution’s name. http://dulaw.summon.serialssolutions.com/ http://auraria.summon.serialssolutions.com/ http://columbia.summon.serialssolutions.com/ http://dartmouth.summon.serialssolutions.com/

SUMMON IS SUPERIOR

In case you didn’t pick it up from the previous slides, in my opinion, Summon is the superior discovery service!

QUESTIONS?

Chris Brown cbrown@du.edu