New Article: “Beyond Simple, Easy, and Fast: Reflections on Teaching Summon”

The following article appears in the just released June 2012 issue of C&RL News.

Title

Beyond Simple, Easy, and Fast: Reflections on Teaching Summon

Authors

Catherine Cardwell
Ohio Wesleyan University
Vera Lux
Bowling Green State University
Robert J. Snyder
Bowling Green State University

Source

College and Research Libraries
June 2012 (73.6)

From the Article

In April 2011, the Bowling Green State (BGSU) University Libraries (UL) selected Summon, Serials Solutions’ Web-scale discovery service, to unlock local collections and provide Google-like access to our resources. Soon after acquiring the service and briefly piloting it, with very little beta testing, the service was fully functional—just in time for the academic year. Not only did librarians agree to a full implementation by that deadline, but they also determined that it would be the default search box on the homepage, raising the stakes for this project even higher.
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In our case, Summon is living up to Serials Solutions’ claim that it is simple, easy, and fast for users. As instruction librarians, we could have based our instruction and interactions with students and faculty on that premise. However, as a consequence of our reflective practice activity, we developed a more nuanced, sophisticated understanding of its capabilities and limitations and, in the end, learned that Summon can be much more than a simple tool for novice users.

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