Brown, Christopher C. “Summon and the Art of Discovery.” Presentation given at the Serials Solutions Western Regional Meeting, 14 September 2012, Aurora, CO.

1. SUMMON AND THE ART OF
DISCOVERY
Christopher C. Brown
University of Denver, Penrose Library
Sept. 14, 2012

2. 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?

3. THE INFORMATION ACCESS ANOMALY
Journal Article Google
Book (average)
(average) (Scholar/Books)
Typical Length - 200 pages x 400 = 15 pages x 400 = 6,000
full text (FT) 80,000 words words
Surrogate Record 300-500 words (400 ave.
50-100 words (75 ave.) 1
(SR) )
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.

4. 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

5. THINKING ABOUT SEARCH MODELS

6. 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.”

7. Discovery Google
Tools Scholar
eBooks Trade Scholarly
Dissertations Newspapers Magazines
Print Books Journals Journals
Surface
Searching Indexing: title, author, keywords, abstract
Full text of content – Every last word
Deep
Searching

8. 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)

9. UNIQUE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS TRIALS
ONLY ONE TRIAL STILL ONGOING
http://eresources.loc.gov/search~S9/?searchtype=Y&searcharg=Article+Fin
der

10. 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=Artic
le+Finder

11. 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.

12. RELEVANCE VS. DISCOVERY
Metadata
Full Text
Higher Higher
Relevance Discovery

13. UNIVERSITY OF DENVER SITUATION
ENCORE VS. SUMMON
Books / Chapters
Harvested
Materials
Articles

14. 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
The fourth analyst placed health care needs within a social welfare
model
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

15. FULL TEXT SEARCH TEST 2
PEER-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.
in their programming. Most staff members were interested in a new
health
is achieved through experiential learning with games, activities, and
medical guest
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)

16. FULL TEXT SEARCH 3
NEWSPAPER
"Denver Expands Light Rail." The Salt Lake Tribune: A.14. Print. 1997.
Although Denver's light-rail transit system is but 5.3 miles long,
ridership exceeds projections and is now averaging well over
15,000 trips
Denver is ready to start construction on an 8.7-mile expansion to
the system
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

17. FULL TEXT SEARCH 4
HATHITRUST PUBLIC DOMAIN
Public libraries : Who should pay the bills? 1978. . United States: .
Library services are in an inferior
purpose create a balanced
Title Present FT Search
Success
Summon Yes (1st) Yes (1st) – with
quotes; Yes (1st) –
with quotes
EDS Yes (but not No; No
HathiTrust)
Primo Central Yes (1st) No; No

18. "TRUE BUGS HAVE PIERCING-SUCKING MOUTHPARTS"
LOC Summon YES
LOC Primo Central NO
LOC EDS NO

19. SOME TESTING
Search Summon EDS Primo Cent
cats 4,027,430 6,707,127 483,518
public domain 4,138,373 1,699,817 495,399
intellectual 1,266,499 868,675 7,472
freedom
colorado 324,077 248,362 38,763
legislature
Denver light rail 184,142 41,528 10,305
business plans 14,515,373 20,741,593 5,076,449

20. SOME TESTING FOR FT
Search Summon FT EDS FT Primo Cent FT
Cats 3,007,852 1,514,596 271,449
public domain 3,486,754 245,313 99,127
intellectual 519,269 579,612 331,410
freedom
colorado 170,807 73,045 34,348
legislature
Denver light rail 63,300 13,840 9,088
business plans 13,251,009 6,374,136 4,589,429

21. WHAT CAN WE CONCLUDE?
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: Total Results FT Results
states
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 sources
Summon has more FT

22. SEARCH COMPARISONS
Search DU Catalog Search Summon Search (limited to Google Books
catalog)
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 0 results 70,774 results 1,340,000 results
depression
Any thoughts as to where to look for a good definition of "special needs"?
"special needs" definition 139 results 27,216 322,000 results

23. 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/

24. SUMMON IS SUPERIOR
 In case you didn’t pick it up from the previous
slides, in my opinion, Summon is the superior
discovery service!

25. QUESTIONS?
 Chris Brown
 cbrown@du.edu