Resource discovery at Leeds Met Library

Just a quick plug for a new Leeds Met blog investigating Resource Discovery and Federated Searching systems for Leeds Met Library:

http://leedsmetlibrary.wordpress.com/

It is, er, blogged by my colleague @DebbieMN but will also include contributions from other library staff and recently, for example, our graduate trainee has posted about his first impressions of Serial Solution’s Summon which is billed as a “web-scale discovery service” that “allows the researcher to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content.” (http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon/)

I also attended the Summon demo last week and was pretty impressed by the Google style simplicity of the search interface – which I suspect will be very popular with students – though some of my librarian colleagues did express reservations about the potential impact on information literacy and were keen to see the advanced search functionality; it is still important to teach more sophisticated information retrieval skills even if students are likely just to head to the simple search box of Google (or Summon)!

One aspect I was particularly interested in was the apparent ease with which Summon can be configured to search an institutional repository – functionality that the University of Huddersfield, who are now running Summon, have already implemented to search their EPrints repository – Huddersfield’s @daveyp tweeted this example using the name of their repository manager @graham_stone – http://hud.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.q=graham+stone