I recently received an e-mail that the next Serials Solutions/Library Journal webcast about Summon will discuss – among other things – the differences between federated search and unified discovery systems. Upon discovering this, I decided to review the entries I’ve written about these differences. Since the last post I wrote on this topic was written last August, it is not surprising that many of the observations I made then are now incorrect. I’d like to take this opportunity to correct some of the statements I made.
Serials Solutions has made agreements with various content providers; our content is limited to what those vendors provide.
Not quite. Simply put, Summon is like any other index. It does not matter which vendors your library uses to provide full-text access to your content; if content is indexed in Summon and the full-text of that content is located in another product, your link resolver should be able to make the connection between the two. It really doesn’t matter if Serials Solutions doesn’t have a relationship with the vendors that provide full text of that content.
Here’s a case in point, drawn from our database use statistics here at GVSU. Since Ebsco is creating a product intended to compete with Summon, they probably do not have a content agreement with Summon. However, our statistics show that use of Academic Search Premier has sky-rocketed since we got Summon. Fewer searches are being conducted in Academic Search Premier, but the full text is getting used more often. (My source for this is statistical analysis performed by my excellent colleague Doug Way. I strongly encourage you to take a look at his slides from a 4/8 webcast on Summon – I think it gives you a really fascinating picture of how Summon has affected use of our collections.)
I do believe that the intent of my original statement was correct – Summon is essentially a yes/no choice. When we implemented a federated search product in the past, we needed to determine which resources we wanted to “connect” to the search product; I believe many federated search vendors also have different pricing models depending on how many resources you would like to connect to.
With Summon, you don’t get to pick and choose. This makes sense – again, remember that Summon is essentially a really big index. You don’t get to decide you want 30% or 60% of MLA International Bibliography, either, so why would you do so for Summon?
To my knowledge, only one index can be searched through Summon. With federated search, you have the capability of creating a variety of searches. You could, for example, create a search that only retrieved information from geology databases. With discovery services, you search all of the content all of the time.
Serials Solutions has released an API for Summon. Although I have not had any experience using this API, I do believe it can be used to create searches with pre-defined parameters.
Because you’re working with a single index, there doesn’t seem to be a way to tell which source a particular search result has come from…This could cause two problems [one of which is that] It limits discovery of specific databases.
Summon recently released a database recommending feature, which addresses this very issue. For example, you can see that searching for “computing” in GVSU’s Summon implementation brings up a recommendation for ACM Digital Library. This warms the cockles of my librarianly heart – while I love Summon, I believe that subject-specific databases remain the better option for certain information needs, and I appreciate that Serials Solutions is exploring ways to help people get to those better options when appropriate.
I hope my clarifications are useful for those of you who are interested in the differences between federated search and unified discovery services!