Before RDA, catalogue records did not clearly distinguish between the author and editor of a work, so Summon could not do this either. We would like Summon results and citations to separate author and editor, where this is possible. This would be particularly helpful when exporting citations to reference manager software such as RefWorks. Currently editors are always imported into the author field. This has caused our users problems as it means their references are inaccurate, unless they notice the problem and manually fix it.

In RDA, terms such as author and editor can be added to the names given in MARC fields 1XX and 7XX, using subfield e. Now that RDA enables you to clearly indicate a person’s role in this way, we would like Summon to separate authors and editors too.

Back in 2013, we received communications from ProQuest that “Product management is currently investigating how best to use new relationship data from 1xx/7xx$e, but we have not established a timeline for changes”.

Stop indexing Ebsco "abstract" results so they no longer appear in Summon "Full-Text" Results with broken links

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).

Make display of all subfields from the 300 physical description field the default in Summon for all types of materials, in the catalog detail screen, results screens, and elsewhere. Currently, Summon only displays 300 MARC physical description information for books in search results and catalog detail pages; and even for books, only subfield “a” (pagination) is included. This means that patrons can’t see information like: number of DVDs or CDs in a set; whether movies are in black-and-white or color; playing time of DVDs or CDs; any accompanying materials like booklets with DVDs or CDs in book-and-CD sets; types and amount of illustrations; etc. This makes selection of desired materials more difficult for patrons. Please map and display subfields, including $a, $b, $c, $e, $f, $g, $3 from the 300 field.

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.

Our library users have expressed great interest in having access to a New Acquisitions listing for our Library. This would display print books received and eBooks purchased in recent weeks, and would refresh on a regular basis. (It would be a bit different to limiting search results by publication date, as we sometimes purchase older publications).

Considering that we already send our catalogue records to Summon, and that we activate new eBook titles via the Client Centre, could there be an option or a facet in the Summon search interface to provide a listing of our new acquisitions?

We would also like to offer access to this listing on our library website, perhaps via a Summon search widget, and display the content in a visually-appealing manner such as that provided by the eBrary/LibraryThing carousel.

(Submitted as Ex Libris Case #00422303 and advised to submit this via Ideas Exchange).

We often find that identical searches performed on consecutive days come up with different numbers of results, and articles found when doing the search on one day don’t appear when doing the search on another day. The explanation we have been given is that it depends which server you hit with your search, but shouldn't the contents of each server be identical? This is especially problematic if you are running a workshop where students are completing a worksheet where they are asked to give numbers of results. The missing content is obviously an issue if you find something useful one day and it has gone the next.