Serials Solutions Advances Library Discovery with Summon 2.0

- Industry-first features and new interface raises the bar for web-scale discovery

SEATTLE, March 18, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Serials Solutions®, a ProQuest® business, introduces Summon® 2.0 creating another historical milestone for library discovery services. Optimized for academic research, Summon 2.0 represents groundbreaking features and a new, modern interface for the Summon discovery service that will resonate with users familiar with open web search engines. Streamlined navigation and contextual guidance features significantly advance the research experience for both novice and experienced researchers – and provides greater opportunities for librarians to deliver value through new ways of engaging with users.

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A first for library discovery services, the new features Summon Topic Explorer™ and Summon Scholar Profiles™ information panes provide users with valuable contextual information to improve research outcomes. In addition, automated query expansion ensures that users don't miss relevant content even when they may not know all the right keywords or appropriate controlled vocabularies to use in a search. Summon 2.0 delivers large-scale, data-driven contextual guidance to users at the point of need.

• Summon Topic Explorer panes dynamically display background information for more than 50,000 topics including recommended research guides, and librarian profiles to encourage users to interact and benefit from the expertise of relevant subject librarians. Developed by analyzing global Summon usage data and leveraging commercial and open access reference content, as well as librarian expertise, this new feature helps users get started (presearch) with the research process and allows librarians to help users when and where they need it most.
•  Summon Scholar Profiles provide instant and authoritative information for more than three million scholars with profiles from ProQuest Scholar Universe which boost relevance, improve search precision and encourage exploratory searching of related key authors and researchers within and across disciplines. Scholar profiles in the context of the discovery environment foster collaborative research and offer librarians opportunities to participate in building, expanding and promoting their institutions' scholars, faculty and researchers.
•  Automated Query Expansion™ improves search precision by including additional keywords and spelling variations for common topical queries. For example if a user searches the term "heart attack" their query would expand to include the term "myocardial infarction." This ensures the most relevant results are returned. Users are able to suspend expanded terms when exact searching is desired.

More details are available in the press release located here.