Simplifying Resource Discovery and Access in Academic Libraries: Implementing and Evaluating Summon at Huddersfield and Northumbria Universities

Abstract

The University of Huddersfield and Northumbria University were two of the first adopters of the Summon™ Web-scale commercial discovery system in Europe. Both universities were moved to implement a discovery tool because they had encountered issues with their existing federated searching products, with students and staff expressing dissatisfaction. This chapter describes the selection, implementation, and testing of Summon™ at both universities drawing out common themes and differences, with suggestions for those intending to implement Summon™ and some ideas for future development. User feedback from surveys, focus groups, and user testing is described, and instruments are appended. User testing evaluated user search refinement, satisfaction with relevancy ranking, comprehension of results presentation, and feature approval responses. The perceived success rate in comparison with Google search results is briefly described. Other concepts described include launching new functionality, key points for effective implementation, MARC mapping, staff training, and marketing a discovery tool.