Archive for November 17th, 2010

The University Library will be introducing a new and enhanced resource discovery service early in 2011.

The AARLIN consortium of Australian University Libraries, of which UNE has been a member for several years, will cease to operate at the end of this year. The Library’s Metasearch and SFX services, which are hosted and maintained by this consortium, will therefore be unavailable after 25 November 2010.

After evaluating the most advanced services currently on the resource discovery market, the Library has purchased the Serials Solutions product, Summon, as the replacement for Metasearch. Summon is the market leader in this type of service and has been taken up by many Australian university libraries, including New South Wales, Newcastle, Macquarie, Queensland, La Trobe, Monash, Swinburne, South Australia, Murdoch, and Edith Cowan.

Summon offers significant improvements over search engines such as Metasearch. Not only does it provide a single search across many of the electronic journals, databases and e-books which UNE subscribes to or owns as well as the library catalogue, it will also search across other types of databases such as e-publications@UNE allowing users to discover academic research papers and higher degree theses as part of the searches.

The Summon instance for UNE is being built and hosted by Serials Solutions in Seattle, Washington, with advice and assistance from Library staff here. It should be ready for use by staff and students in time for First Semester 2011. There will be a short period where a single overarching resource discovery service will be unavailable at UNE. However, access to databases and electronic journals will continue to be available via the Journal articles & databases link on the Library home page.

We regret this gap but trust you will find Summon a superior service on its release in 2011.