Summon
Your feedback matters to us. Help us improve Summon, as well as the 360 and Intota administrative services, by telling us what you’d like to see using the message areas below. You can also can support something already posted.
We would love to be able to respond to every idea that is submitted, but this is not feasible. We are, however, committed to responding to the most popular ideas—those that have received the most points.
For more information please review our FAQ and guidelines. Thank you.
302 results found
-
Make combination of "Fulltext Online" and facet "Library Location" results possible
Many of our patrons are interested in setting the filters to results available in the specific library location they are actually working in. They miss a functionality to combine fulltext results with the specific library holdings.
11 votes -
Make searches with ‘query expansion’ customisable
We would like to be able to add, remove or edit query expansion topic matches to improve the topic and subject matches and prevent incorrect query expansion.
Query expansion is supposed to link synonymous subjects and topics, so the user doesn’t have to enter all terms in their search (e.g. ‘heart attack’ and ‘myocardial infarction’). Sometimes the query expansion function gives incorrect or unhelpful topic matches. For example a search for ‘civil litigation’ automatically expands to include ‘jurisprudence’. These are not synonymous terms.
ExLibris tell us that currently it isn’t possible to change or remove specific instances of query expansion,…
2 votes -
Expanding the Credo content connected to records used by Summon Topic Explorer.
Credo has content that should be showing up in the Topic Explorer box, but it's not because that content isn't connected to the records Summon searches for Topic Explorer content.
3 votes -
Would love to be able to change the order of the content types on the left sidebar of the results page
Instead of content type facet displaying the content types with the highest number of results, make it customizable so admin. can decide which ones show (and in which order) in the abbreviated list.
52 votesUpdated to consider for the 2026 roadmap.
-
Prioritise published articles over repository content
Where there is a published version of an article in a journal and the same article in our open access repository, we would like Summon to put the published version first in the search results.
This request has come from our academics who are concerned that people are choosing the top result (the pre-publication version in our repository) and missing the published version. This is particularly a problem when the repository version is only available on request or has limited access.
7 votes -
More cleary identify between full-text articles and full-text abstracts
As an electronic resources librarian, I often get patron-confusion reports when they believe they cannot access a full-text article; often enough the full-text of the article is not available online, but the article's abstract is. Icons in Summon often represent these abstracts as full-text articles.
312 votes -
Add the ability to reflect access frequency to relevancy ranking
A mechanism that automatically takes records from databases with high access frequency to the top of the search results preferentially.
2 votes -
Avoid redundancy and outdated data while displaying results
Availability of "Display latest editions only" and "Remove the duplicates" options.
8 votes -
Add union catalog as limiter/filter
Summon does a great job searching our local catalog. I'd like to be able to add our statewide union catalog (OhioLINK) as a second, separate catalog and allow users to click a filter to "add in" results from that catalog if they don't find the book they're looking for in their initial search. Right now we have to have users link out to OhioLINK and do a separate search - I'd like to keep them in Summon for union catalog searching.
6 votes -
Utilizing Talis Aspire Item linking API
Talis Aspire Reading lists have an 'item linking API' which can be used to improve Summon search features. This linking API can provide information whether search results items are part of the Reading lists. It will hugely benefit Talis Aspire customers if this integration can be achieved. Thank you.
More information can be found at:
https://support.talis.com/hc/en-us/articles/205715012-Item-linking-API13 votes -
Retrieve similar documents using the native 'MoreLikeThis' Lucene feature
Lucene's 'MoreLikeThis' feature retrieves similar documents based on a seed, which can be either a piece of text, or an already retrieved document (syntax-free search).
19 votes -
Include the journal impact factor in the results display
To help our students judge the quality of the results it would be good if the journal's impact factor could be displayed in the results. Or even better, provided as a sorting or limiting option so that students could view results in those journals with the highest impact factor, in the same way they can limit by peer review. Although impact factors are not a perfect tool, it would help get the message across that not all journals are equal. This feature would probably need to be restricted to those libraries with a subscription to JCR.
5 votes -
Support the use of French boolean operators
Searching using the French boolean operators - et/ou/sauf -- is not currently fully supported in Summon. This would be a useful addition to those libraries who provide a French interface to their instance of Summon.
40 votes -
Books that have popular alternative titles (i.e. 'Civil Procedure' = 'The White Book') should be searchable under those titles
Books that have popular alternative titles (i.e. 'Civil Procedure' = 'The White Book' in most law libraries) should be searchable under those titles. At the very least Summon should prioritise the 246 alternate title field more than it currently does.
40 votes -
Add ability to share via SMS items in "Saved Items" folders
Please add the ability to share via SMS items saved to "Saved Items" folders, (either temporary or permanent folders). Right now it seems we are limited to using Print and Email. SMS would be helpful for quick transactions, and finding items in the physical collection.
See this support page and the attached mockup image for more detail.
https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Summon/Product_Documentation/Searching_in_The_Summon_Service/Using_Results/Summon%3A_Saving_Items_(Citations)Thanks for considering this idea.
-Chris9 votes -
Add a French Dictionary/Encyclopedia (3rd search results pane)
As a francophone (French-speaking) library, we would like to be able to add an authoritative dictionary/encylopedia whose topics can be displayed in the 3rd search results pane. Much like Wikipedia and other encyclopedias.....
Suggestions - Universalis.fr, Larousse.fr, etc.
4 votes -
Springshare Chat Widgets in Summon Mobile Friendly
We have noticed with the Springshare v2 chat widget (LibAnswers) found in our Summon search page, it completely disappears when accessing it in a mobile device. With most of the links found in the Summon interface (such as the "Advanced Search" and "Add results beyond your library's collection"), they automatically get pushed into the hamburger menu.
Is it possible for the LibAnswer’s chat widget (link) to be automatically pushed there also?
We feel like users using mobile devices should be able to access our Library chat just in case they come across a reference question or would like to report…
12 votes -
Be able to limit bX Recommendations to fulltext holdings in your library to avoid too many "not available" results
Smaller academic libraries like community colleges will not have a lot of the recommendations suggested by bX Recommender, leading to too many "not available" results for students. For big university libraries who subscribe to 10 times the amount of content, this won't be an issues. For us smaller folks, it would be nice if we could limit bX recommendations to our own fulltext holdings so students would get usable results most or all of the time. bX recommender is otherwise a great tool for even the student who is new to college.
18 votes -
Expand the 500 row limit on usage reports in Summon OBI
Hello all,
I have recently had to extract some statistics from the OBI interface and found out that there is a limit of 500 rows at a time. This seems like a tiny amount of rows, given that I used to extract 50,000 - 100,000 at a time from the old stats platform. For libraries that have to extract statistics in order to do analysis, etc, it seems like a good idea to expand this limit from 500 to a much higher number.
When extracting statistics for March 2017 for one particular report (Zero Search Results), I had to extract…
5 votes -
Expand Best Bets Characters to include :
This would enable best bet recommendations for book and article titles that have a subtitle.
At the moment tags for best bets have limitations on the types of characters that can he used i.e. letters, numbers or any of the following symbols (-_ .&/'@#). Colons (:) cannot be used. It would be very helpful to be able to use colons because of how common they are in titles. Our zero result usage stats show that our users are searching article titles that include a colon.
10 votes
- Don't see your idea?