This presentation is an educational comparison of two web-scale discovery platforms commonly used in academic libraries: Serials Solutions' Summon product, and ExLibris' Primo product. It is a Pecha Kucha presentation and was created for LIS 587.
Jane Austen Goes to College: A Summon vs. Primo Comparison
1. Jane Austen Goes to College:
A Summon vs. Primo Comparison
by Elizabeth Brookbank
2. Comparison criteria
~26,000 students ~19,000 students
Undergraduate and Undergraduate and
graduate graduate
3 libraries 9 libraries on 3
~2 million campuses
volumes, 69,000 print ~5 million volumes,
and electronic journal 109,000 print and
Serial Solutions’ electronic journals
Summon ExLibris’ Primo
3. Comparison criteria cont’d
Find vs. Get
Relevancy weighting
Branding/layout
Basic searching
Advanced searching
End-user features and controls
Results enrichment
20. In summary.
Summon:
Final verdict: better for advanced searchers, barely
passable for basic searchers
Primo:
Final verdict: better for basic searchers, OK for advanced
searchers
Notas del editor
I chose to compare two academic libraries that use proprietary web-scale discovery services: Serial Solutions’ Summon and ExLibris’ Primo. This is of course too short a time period to discuss every element of both systems, but my hope is that by viewing the OPACS through the eyes of two of our users, a sufficient comparison can be made.
Both large research universities. Oregon State has 26K students, Northwestern 19K. Both have undergraduate and graduate programs, both are PhD granting institutions. OSU is a member of the cascade alliance and thus will be migrating to Primo soon, as we all know.
See chart. From The Ins and Outs of Evaluating Web-Scale Discovery Services by Athena Hoeppner
an undergraduate who has to find an assigned book for a class they are only half paying attention to Undergraduate: assigned text for the class is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The student knows it is a book by Jane Austen, but doesn’t remember the title – all her books are basically the same right? Just wants to find the book, she will know the title when she sees it…a graduate student working on their thesis who needs very specific resourcesGraduate: doing an initial literature review for her hopeful thesis topic: Jane Austen and her treatment of war, refuting the notion that she ignored it in her works. She’s an adept library user and searcher, but is new to this university and catalog.
So far, so good – single entry search.
Branding/layout is ok – a bit cluttered to my eye. I find the “online” stickers to be garish.Relevancy ranking not great. Favored a very specific article at the topic, seemingly purely because of format (SS is a serial vendor, after all). Pushes title/subject keyword results to top, favors e-resources over print, favors journal articles over ebooks, over web resource, over print. No books BY Jane Austen on first page.
Does have all the filters, but not many: full text and peer-reviewed, language, content type (not format), location, etc. Worse for our undergrad, no author facet!
Because no way to get to books BY Austen (at least that she could see), our undergrad gave up for the moment and asked her classmate the next day what the title of the book is. Now she’s in an even bigger hurry because she has one less day to read the book. She makes a typo while typing the title into the search field…
has some book covers (only in preview record, not full), has “related books from other libraries” at the bottom. Resource availability and call # in initial results/preview record.Our undergrad is able to read the book online for now, and request it from another Summit library.
Single entry, so far so good (no “go” or “search” button, which threw her off at first)
Branding/layout:cleaner lines, doesn’t make good use of all space thoughhas about half of book covers, no recommendations, can view a search for the item in other places – web search, ILL, etc.Relevancy: pushes title/subject to top, favors other media over books, favors e-resources over print
Searching:has all the filters in one place: full text, peer-reviewed, format, location, language. Author/creator is one of them!
When she clicks on that limiter, she gets all the books by Jane Austen and recognizes P&P midway down the page. When she clicks to view all versions, she gets all the info she needs to locate and get the item.
Our graduate student searches the OSU library homepage in vain for an “advanced search” option, and thus just does a simple (to her) search in the one box for janeausten AND war. She gets too many results for a specific item called “Jane Austen and the War of Ideas”, which she doesn’t want, so she tries to exclude that and is successful. There are a few related books in the resulting set, but she finds it odd that an online article that is entirely unrelated to her topic and doesn’t even seem to have the word “war” in it is listed above a book that is very much about her topic: Jane Austen and the Navy.
After reviewing this set of results and writing down a few call numbers/titles, she sees the “Advanced Search” link next to the simple search box. Hallelujah! She searches there with a more specific set of terms.
This yields more relevant results, and our grad student is able to save the relevant ones simply by clicking on a folder icon right in the preview record.
Our graduate accidentally spells “jane” wrong, and the catalog does not correct her (the OSU catalog doesn’t do this when there is an “and” either) She redoes her search and finds a couple of interesting items, but not much.
She went to the advanced search form that she again found once she did her initial search and was relatively unimpressed with the options it gave her. She did a more specific search anyways though, and only got three results – all of which were results that were also in her initial set. Frustrated, she went back to her initial search results and tried adjusting by using the limiters on the left-hand side. None of the subjects really stood out to her though, and she didn’t want to limit by date, didn’t know what specific authors she was looking for, etc. She was pretty exasperated.
She went back to her initial results and marked the results on the first few pages that appealed to her. She did this by clicking the stars next to each item – this added the item to her “eShelf”.When she opens her eShelf, she can add notes to each item and export its citation via RefWorks, EndNote, or plain text.
