Make display of all 5xx note fields the default in Summon in the Catalog Detail page, results screen and elsewhere. These fields already appear in Primo, with various labels (General note for 500, Language note for 546, Awards note for 586, Bibliography for 504, etc.). With these omitted from Summon, patrons are missing vital, helpful information from bibliographic records, such as: accessibility features for patrons with disabilities (532, 546); detailed language information--not just the languages themselves, but whether they’re for subtitles, described video, certain articles in anthologies, etc. (546); awards won for picture books, Academy Award winning movies, etc. (586); translation information (500, 546); DVD special features (500); “based on” information for movies, graphic novel or mass market adaptations, etc. (500); issues included in collections (vital for graphic novel reader continuity) (500); target audience for reading levels, content advisories, etc. (521); cast and crew of movies (511/508); dissertation information (502); open access information (506); whether bibliographies are included (504); and so on. We include this information when creating bibliographic records to be helpful to patrons; having it invisible in Summon is counterproductive.

A while back I was looking at our facet usage stats for 2017 to date, and I noticed that although we have Newspaper Articles excluded from searches by default, this facet has the highest amount of 'uses'. I asked Ex-Libris Support if this was because every search a user runs is, by default, including the exclusion of Newspapers as a facet use. I also asked if there was a way to get stats on the number of people who remove the exclusion of newspaper articles after running their first search.

For an example, this was our top-used facet at the time I was doing my search, but as we have Newspaper Articles excluded by default it doesn't seem likely that this is actually the facet most searchers click on to refine results by:

Newspaper Article
...Facets selected: 792,132
...Sessions: 286,444

The response I got from Ex-Libris Support was: "Unfortunately, the reporting does not show include vs exclude currently, so our product management team has put that in the queue for a future enhancement." They also recommended I add this as an idea here, to get more traction.

In Summon, series titles and volume numbers are not being displayed for publications from monographic series with content type such as ebook, book, and Government Document. To display the series title and volume number, users have to click on the Preview link.

Users often identify or search series publications by the title and number of the series and not necessarily by the title of the monograph publication within that series. This is particularly true with grey literature or when a publication is being published annually or periodically under the same or very similar title. By not showing this information on the result page, we are not providing adequate access to these publications thereby inadvertently misleading our users.

We would like to see the series title (Series field) and the volume number (Volume field) displayed on the result page beside and before the year of publication (Date field) when the publication belongs to a series.

I'd be interested to know (based on feedback from library colleagues and users at my institution) whether it's possible to add Mendeley to the list of Export Options for references in Summon.

I understand that Mendeley users can currently export from Summon in some form, but they need to have an additional tool (the Mendeley Web Importer bookmark) in place in order to do this.

Would it be possible to add this to the Export Options list so users can export references in the usual way? I understand this is already in place for other providers, e.g. Refworks, Zotero, Endnote etc.

One persistent problem we have between Summon and EBSCO is abstracts indexed as articles in Summon. Some journals index these abstracts as individual titles, which is why they get pulled into Summon as standalone full text articles, but EBSCO (which is where we have full text) does not index them at all. So not only does the openURL break, if you search for them in EBSCO you often get zero hits. Since we have so much full text in EBSCO, this accounts for a good many of our bad urls in Summon and it is frustrating and confusing for librarians and users.

There's no consistent format for book review titles appearing in various periodicals. Across the Summon index, one sees entries like:

• {author name} {book title}


• {book title}


• Review: {book title}

and all manner of different combinations of these elements. Unfortunately, OpenURL linking to destination databases fails unless both sources agree upon the format of the title. Summon describes book review titles one way and it might match some databases, many it will not. Links from Summon to ProQuest databases don't even work consistently (see attachment).

Summon needs an approach superior to naive OpenURL linking or poorly formed searches using title metadata. Often, plenty of non-title metadata uniquely describes the item in question (date, issue, volume, and starting page rarely have the same disagreement issues as textual data).