Summa/Search and Facets
Digital Libraries à la Carte 2009
Tilburg University, 2009-07-31
Mads Villadsen <mv@statsbiblioteket.dk>

A Short History of
Summa/Search

Why?
 Improve response times
 Greater flexibility to create a system that had end user
concerns as a priority
 Expose all our resources through a single point of entry
 Combine IT knowledge with knowledge of library
science

How
Integrated search
 Speed and meaningful ranking of material from
different sources
Exploratory search
 Help users find what they are looking for – even if
they don't quite know it themselves
Motivational design
 Show users the information they need when they
need it

“Facets” – Limit Your
Search
Limit your search to certain material types

Facets – No Counts
Proper facets. The facet counts came later.

Facets Today
Proper facet counts. Only the most useful facets are shown.

Facet Information
Current system at the State and University Library
 9.1 million records
 8.7 million unique tags in 15 facets
 Average number of tags/document is 10
 Large facets
 Subject: 3.5 million unique tags
 Author: 4.8 million unique tags

How Did It All Work Out?

Recent Usability Test:
The Good
 The Google-like initiatives
 One simple search field
 Search suggestions
 Did-You-Mean
 The integration of extra information in the full records –
especially covers and abstracts
 The Todo list

Recent Usability Test:
What To Improve
 Users had trouble finding journal articles
 Many users failed to discover the facets
 Further tweaking of the relevancy ranking
 Simplification of the request procedure

What Now?

Simple Changes
 Rename “order list” to “basket”
 Make it possible to add any item to the Todo list
 Move facets to the left side
 ...

Search Tomorrow

More Data
User expectations: If they can't find it in Search, then we
don't have it.
Particularly a problem with article level data.
Will make the experience as a whole better for the end
user.

Rethink Facet Presentation

Clustering
Add clustering framework to facilitate automatic tag
extraction.
May link together articles, books, and data-sets that the
user hadn't thought of.
Should prove very useful with full text data.

Other
 Rights integration
 Duplicate reduction
 User specific ranking
 Further develop system and statistics tools
 Index look-ups
 And more...

Resources
 The hybrid library: from the users perspective
http://www.statsbiblioteket.dk/om-statsbiblioteket/brugbarhed/feltstudier
 Summa Site
http://statsbiblioteket.dk/summa/
 Search Usability Test
http://www.statsbiblioteket.dk/summa/search%20-%20usability-test-English.pdf
 Code4lib 2009 presentation on Complete Faceting
http://www.code4lib.org/conference/2009/eskildsen

Questions?