Ucr summon

Dave PatternMartin PhilipUniversity of Huddersfieldd.c.pattern@hud.ac.uk

Summon at Huddersfield

• Background• Why Summon?• Summon implementation & launch• Student focus groups• Quick tour of Summon!• Usage stats

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Contents

E-Resource ProvisionA Word Document! (2000)

E-Resource ProvisionITS OneLog (2003)

E-Resource ProvisionEx Libris Metalib (2006)

E-Resource ProvisionWoot! Woot! Federated Search!

E-Resource ProvisionFederated Search?! Meh…

Meanwhile, in the real world…Google Scholar (launched Nov 2004)

• “To provide ease of searching and access for the user, whilst reducing the workload for Systems and Technical Services, and remaining within current budget levels.”

Electronic Resources ReviewApril 2009

• “Make recommendations for future provision, e.g. for the next 5 years, taking into account system interoperability and future-proofing.”

Electronic Resources ReviewApril 2009

1. First class search engine - relevancy ranking, facets, fast results, etc

2. The “one-stop shop” - personalisation, reduce silos of data, etc

3. Improved systems management - interoperability, usage stats, open standards, etc

4. Improved value for money

Electronic Resources Review“The Vision”

• Small selection of suppliers invited to give 45 minute product demos

• Products rated against “The Vision”• Report to Library Management Group

– 3 options for moving forward with pros & cons

Electronic Resources Review“The Vision”

“This is the transformational technology which has long been needed to meet student and

academic staff expectations in an increasingly complex information environment.”

Huddersfield Adopts SummonAugust 2009

• 94% of our subscribed journals were already full-text indexed in Summon…– other vendors were unable and/or unwilling to

supply data

• …therefore, no need to make do with a compromise(d) solution using federated search for the non-indexed material

Why Summon?

• New platform, developed with Open Source software– Serial Solutions have fed their improvements back

to the Lucene/SOLR developer community

• Excellent developer APIs– for both Summon and 360 Link

Why Summon?

Summon Implementation

• Sep 2009 implementation starts• Oct 2009 Summon instance delivered• Feb 2009 360 Link goes live• Mar 2010Summon “soft launch”• Aug 2010 Summon replaces Metalib

Implementation Timelinetaking it nice and slow!

…actually, we were ready to

go fully live in January 2010!

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Implementationtechnical stuff

• Access predominantly via EZproxy• resolved majority of off-campus issues• more seamless than Athens & Shibboleth

• Students encouraged to report problems• Journal print holdings added to 360 Core

• …although these initially displayed as being “available online” within Summon!

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Implementationtechnical stuff

• Electronic Resources Wiki• http://library.hud.ac.uk/wiki/• provides access to a selection of databases• linked to from within Summon via “dummy”

MARC records

• Journal title links added to Summon• using “dummy” MARC records

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Implementationtechnical stuff

• Serials Solutions 360 Core• Knowledge base for Summon and 360 Link• Journals staff found it extremely simple and quick

to use

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Summon Launch

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Summon Launch

• Promoted internally from Nov 2009• Promoted to all staff from early 2010• Formally launched by PVC for Research &

Enterprise during the University’s annual Research Festival (Mar 2010)

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Summon Launch

• From March 2010 onwards, promoted to students from within Metalib• “Coming soon…”• “Get ahead of the game…”• “Test drive it today and give us your feedback!”

• Summon replaced Metalib at end of July

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Summon Launch

• Lots of promotional items & materials…• Summon pens with logo & URL• bags with “Summon – Research in the bag”

• Two main slogans:• “Research has never been so easy”• “A serious Research engine”

• http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/9447/

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Summon Launchon-campus publicity

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Summon Launchon-campus publicity

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Summon Launchon-campus publicity

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Summon Launch…did the publicity work?

• On average, since the launch, just over 4,000 students use Summon every week• by Dec 2010, logins were up 20% on the same

period in 2009

• 83.8% of students have heard of Summon and have used it at least once• 2011 Computing & Library Services Student Survey

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Focus Groups

• Conducted as part of the implementation of Summon (and my dissertation)

• 5 Focus Groups (33 students)– 18 PG Taught– 13 UG– 2 PG Research

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Focus Groups

• To examine the existing search behaviours of students– questionnaire

• To observe how students use Summon– observation and group discussion

• To explore participants initial responses to using Summon– observation and group discussion

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Focus Groupsobjectives

• Completed before taking part in the search task and group discussion

• Collected demographic information from participants– name, course, level, year of study

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Focus Groupsquestionnaire

• General questions asked about their experience of using resource discovery products, e.g.– “When searching for information, do you type one

or two words into the search box?” – “Do you use advanced search?”

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Focus Groupsquestionnaire

• Structured task used alongside questionnaire and group discussions

• Lasting around 15 to 20 minutes, designed to replicate real situation of a participant using Summon to find information for their studies

• Sample questions provided– if students couldn’t think of anything to search of

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Focus Groupsobservation

• Notable behaviour was recorded using checklist – body language– more specific information seeking-related behaviours– inspired by Stephan et al’s (2006) usability study of a

university library homepage• One facilitator with approximately three

observers per participant

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Focus Groupsobservation

• Discussion inspired by Brantley et al (2006)• User comments are extremely useful for

identifying navigation and layout problems– data gathered from this study enabled us to

evaluate Summon and it’s intuitiveness• 6 Group discussions recorded and transcribed

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Focus Groupsgroup discussion

• Inputting one or two keywords into search engines was most popular search method

• Recorded in previous studies, Tallent (2004:70)

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Focus Groupsfindings

• Evidence from this and other studies, clearly shows that students are transferring their search behaviour from web search engines, to academic research

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Focus Groupsfindings

• 18 out of 33 participants said they regularly made use of the advanced search function within search engines

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Focus Groupsfindings – advanced search

strongly agree

agree

not sure

disagree

strongly disagree

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20

Figure 5: I use advanced search

Number of responses

Resp

onse

sele

ction

• Limitation of this study – majority of participants were MSc, so it is to be

expected that they had more advanced skills than undergraduates.

(Oberhelman, 2006)

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Focus Groupsfindings – advanced search

• Before observation, majority of students stated that they use a search engine regularly for academic research

• Only 8 participants said they didn’t use Metalib or an equivalent more than once a week

• Evidence that as one student puts it “they can find lots of useful information on Google”

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Focus Groupsfindings

• Preview of article feature was joint most used feature in in Summon – 30 out of the 33 participants made use of this feature, which

suggests they found it a very useful tool for their research• Although intuitive and relevant results retrieved,

resource discovery products need such features that add-value

• Literature is littered with examples of students’ frustrations with poor resource discovery systems

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Focus Groupsfindings

• Generally, participants did not use the refining facets within Summon – reason may be 20 minutes time during structured

search task– could also be impatience? (Oberhelman, 2006)

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Focus Groupsfindings – refining facets

• Interesting to note prominence of facets:– Google added refining facets onto their results

page in 2009– students therefore maybe more likely to use such

features on Summon when conducting academic research

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Focus Groupsfindings – refining facets

• General consensus from students, after using Summon and sharing their thoughts, was that they were very impressed– easy and intuitive, especially when compared with

Metalib– quick to retrieve results– received lots of results– some more experienced users questioned the quality

of results

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Focus Groupsgroup discussion

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Focus Group Commentseasy/intuitive

I felt like there was a lot you could do without

needing any help.

I think if you were coming across both (Metalib and Summon) for the first time,

you’d probably have more success straight away with Summon on your own.

You’ve not got as many fiddly bits to do; you just type in what you want. It’s almost

like Google Scholar, so I like it for that.Richard

Nicole

Maria

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Focus Group Commentslots of results

I think you get a lot more articles from Summon because (in Metalib) you’ve got to search within each different

database and your research takes you a little bit longer.

Caroline

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Focus Group Commentsquality of results

What’s coming up? Or is this really what I was looking for? [I] wasn’t particularly sure about

how useful [results] were for what I was trying to

find out about.

...some useful, some not so useful but that’s the way it is with everything; it’s the same with a Google search

and Metalib search, any search. The more you

refine it, the more relevant your results will be.

Richard

Jo

• (Morrison, 2005) argues implementation of resource discovery systems is key to their success – products generally regarded by users as good systems

and appear to satisfy the need of the students, are still not used by students – instead they turn to Google

– lack of promotion

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Focus Groups

• Literature suggests despite excellent feedback on Summon, at least for undergraduates, it doesn’t yet have strong enough brand presence– wasn’t fully launched until July 2010

• Ongoing promotion required – likelihood of users forgetting Summon and inevitably defaulting back to Google

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Focus Groups

• The purpose of study was to see if students liked Summon and to compare findings with the current literature

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Focus Groupssummary of findings

• Summary:– the sample of students used Summon and thought

it was excellent– based on the observational data collected it was

clear participants thought Summon to be a vast improvement on Metalib

– they found it to be intuitive; fast at retrieving results and also that it provided lots of results

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Focus Groupssummary of findings

• Summary:– the participants felt they needed some instruction

when making use of the additional features such as the refining facets

– it was suggested that more advanced users would require specific instruction as well, to best make use of the additional features

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Focus Groupssummary of findings

• Summary:– hoped this research can contribute to the ongoing

discussion surrounding resource discovery system– many of the findings correspond with much of

literature – suggests that undergraduate students would like a good quality one-stop-shop to use for their academic research

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Focus Groupssummary of findings

• Summary:– because of Summon, there were some continuing

students who were very much looking forward to their studies next year!

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Focus Groupssummary of findings

• Brantley, S, Armstrong, A, and Lewis K. M. (2006). "Usability Testing of a Customizable Library Web Portal", College & Research Libraries, 67 (2), 146-163.

• Flick, U. (2009). An Introduction to Qualitative Research. London: SAGE Publications.• Gibson, I, Goddard, C. L. and Gordon, S. (2008). "One Box to Search Them All: Implementing Federated Search at an

Academic Library." Library Hi Tech, 27 (1), 118-133.• Korah, A, and Cassidy, E. D. (2010). "Students and Federated Searching: A Survey of Use and Satisfaction" Reference

& User Services Quarterly, 49 (4), 325-332.• Morrison, P. J. (2005). "The Patron Strikes Back: A Review of Recent Library Web Site Usability Studies". [Online]

Kent State University Information Use and Services. [Accessed 14 July 2010].• Oberhelman, D. (2006). "The Time Machine: Federated Searching Today and Tomorrow." Reference Reviews, 20 (3),

6-8.• Stephan, L. M., Cheng, D. T., and Young, L. M. (2006). "A Usability Study at the University of Mississippi Libraries for

the Improvement of the Library Homepage." [Online] Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32 (1), 35-51.• Stubbings, R. (2003). "MetaLib and SFX at Loughborough University Library." Vine, 33(1), 25-32.• Tallent, E. (2004). "Metasearching in Boston College Libraries – a case study of user" reactions. New Library World,

105(1/2), 69-75.

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Focus Groupsbibliography

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A Quick Tour of Summon

• Library catalogue– books, videos, DVDs, scores, etc

• Journals (print & electronic)– mixture of subscription & Open Access content

• University repository• Off-air TV & radio recordings (UniTube)

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What’s in Summon now?

• University Archives• Embedded multimedia

– e.g. off-air recordings

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What’s not Summon yet?

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Summonlibrary.hud.ac.uk/summon/

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Summonlibrary.hud.ac.uk/summon/

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Summonrefine to peer-reviewed articles…

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Summoninclude/exclude subject terms…

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Summoninclude/exclude subject terms…

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SummonWeb of Science citation counts…

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Summonsearch beyond the library collection…

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Summonaccessing full-text…

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Summonaccessing full-text…

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Summonaccessing full-text…

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Summonaccessing full-text…

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Electronic Resources Wikilibrary.hud.ac.uk/wiki/

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• …

Electronic Resources Wikilibrary.hud.ac.uk/wiki/

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Electronic Resources Wikilibrary.hud.ac.uk/wiki/

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Electronic Resources Bloglibrary.hud.ac.uk/blogs/er/

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Electronic Resources Blog library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/er/

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“Report a Problem”

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Usage Stats

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Full Text Downloadsresource 1

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Full Text Downloadsresource 2

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Full Text Downloads resource 3

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Full Text Downloadsresource 4

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One final word...

• “Summon is bloody brilliant. It blows Metalib out of the water! It gives fast, efficient and above all relevant research results. I found on Summon in 2 days what would have taken 2 weeks on Metalib.”– Abdul, PHD student and part-time lecturer

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One final word...

• Any questions?

d.c.pattern@hud.ac.ukmartin.philip@hud.ac.uk

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Thank you!