Serials Solutions Summon Announced

When I started my career as a reference librarian at the Cook Memorial Library – a small public library in Illinois – I never imagined the path I would take, or the changes that would be made in information discovery.

When people asked questions about where to find information, I tried to teach them the difference between the card catalog and a magazine article index.  Helping patrons understand the difference between books and articles was challenging.  Today, it’s even more challenging. Users brought up with the Internet treat all information equally and often fail to understand where in our information hierarchies (the OPAC, databases, the institutional repository) they need to search.

Information retrieval is light years ahead– and yet, we still have barriers. Library collections continue to intimidate users – a problem that’s compounded by the lure of easy searching on the open Web.  Today’s users see all information as the same. They go to Google for everything and often spend too much time finding what they need or can’t find what they are looking for at all.

But, today we’re removing those barriers. Today, we’re making library collections as easily searched as Google makes the worldwide web. I’m so proud to introduce to you a new service that allows researchers to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content. Through one simple search, patrons can find instant access to the breadth of authoritative content that’s the hallmark of great libraries – digital and print, audio and video, single articles to entire e-journals, and every format in between.   

The Serials Solutions Summon™ unified discovery service is a leap forward that furthers our mission of helping libraries be the best partner for research. It’s simple, easy and fast – and made for libraries.

We are previewing the Serials Solutions Summon™ service this week at ALIA Information Online in Sydney, later this week at ALA Midwinter in Denver, next week at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference in Toronto, and in two weeks at the 9th Annual Bielefeld Conference in Bielefeld, Germany.

I hope you’ll stop by our booth if you are attending one of those events. If you aren’t, please visit www.serialssolutions.com/summon/ to discover more about this new, exciting service that will soon be available through Serials Solutions.

Sincerely,

Jane Burke
Vice President & General Manager
SerialsSolutions