Laura on unified discovery services

Laura of the Llyfrgellydd Blog posts some observations about the implementation of Summon at Grand Valley State University. Here are the highlights of her points. See the article for more detail:

• One does not have a choice about the content in a discovery service.
• To my knowledge, only one index can be searched through Summon.
• 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.
      It could throw off your database statistics.
      It limits discovery of specific databases.

And, a couple of caveats.

1. With the exception of my second point above, these all seem to me to be very “librarian” issues. Yes, they will effect the user – but are these things that most of our users are going to care about? Honestly, I don’t think so.
2. As I noted above, my place of work is the first commercial adopter of Summon. To my knowledge, Ebsco’s discovery product isn’t live yet. My point is that discovery services are still a pretty young technology – there’s a lot of potential for improvement and change in the coming months (and years).

Tags: federated search