To go into a little more detail about what we're hoping to achieve, here's the project spec. Primarily, we'll be creating a new library portal (currently dubbed "MyLibrary") that will provide a bespoke view of key library services and will include the following planned functionality: the ability to view items on loan and renew them, [...]
Posts under ‘Summon’
Operation Dump the OPAC
If you follow me on Twitter (@daveyp), you'll probably know already that we're about to take the plunge and retire our OPAC in favour of using Summon. There are a few drivers behind this, including: the OPAC's search facility is crude by modern standards and it's difficult to refine a search it looks like the [...]
A week on Summon (revisited)
After yesterday's blog post, I thought I'd have a go at narrowing down my definition of a "separate search". If a user enters some search terms, and then uses 2 facets to refine the search before clicking on a result, I was classing that as 3 separate searches — what niggled me overnight was that [...]
A week on Summon
[ update: slightly revised stats are available here! ] We've just started collecting in-depth data about how students are searching Summon (keywords entered, facets selected, etc) and I thought some of you might be interested in an early analysis from the last 7 days (just under 40,000 separate searches by 2,807 students)… On average, students [...]
Relevancy Rules
Inspired by the Summon result click stats that Matthew Reidsma has extracted (and, to be honest, I find myself being regularly inspired by what Matthew's doing!), I've started tracking the clicks on our Summon instance too. Anyone who's had the misfortune to hear me present recently will know I've been waffling on about the importance [...]
Hacking Summon for Fun and Profit (part 1)
OK, I'll admit it, I've fallen in love with jQuery over the last 18 months I've ended up using quite a bit of jQuery in our new reading list software ("MyReading"), to add various bells and whistles, including dropping an "add to MyReading" option into the Summon interface. Like they say, "when you've got a [...]
Tweaking the Summon Search Widget code
Summon has a really cool new custom search box building widget that includes the ability to pre-limit a search to a specific discipline (or disciplines). The widget also allows you to pre-select which facets to apply to the search. A question came up on the SummonClients mailing list asking if it was possible to exclude [...]
Hacking 360 Link
A quick plug for Matthew Reidsma's ace blog post about customising 360 Link with jQuery: "jQuery for Customizing Hosted Library Services
Using the Serials Solutions APIs for the MyReading project
I had planned to go along to SummonCamp at ALA Midwinter on Sunday and talk about using the Summon API but, perhaps all too predictably, I ended up staying up waaaaay too late on Saturday night sampling some yummy US beers, forgot to set my alarm and overslept Anyway, here's what I would have talked [...]
Extending the availability messages in Summon
At the recent SummonCamp in New Orleans, there was a question about the local "Availability:" messages that appear in Summon for things like books, e.g. Availability: available, Huddersfield (Loan Collection Floor 6 – 2 wk loan) By default, Summon either scrapes your OPAC or makes use of an ILS/LMS API to get real time availability. [...]