“Double Your Disruption? Discover Happier Users: Implementing Local vs. Cloud-based Discovery Systems” co-written and presented with Scott Garrison. Presentation delivered at the 2011 MLA conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan

1. Double Your Disruption? Discover
Happier Users: Implementing Local
vs. Cloud-based Discovery Systems
Scott Garrison | Sheila Bair | George Boston
October 27, 2011

2. Double Your Disruption! Discover
Happier Users: Implementing Local
vs. Cloud-based Discovery Systems
Scott Garrison | Sheila Bair | George Boston
October 27, 2011

3. Attacking the Problem
• 2004 LibQUAL+ IC D-M scores low
• Voyager increasingly outdated ca. 2006
• 400+ silos: SFX was a good start
• Users start with Google
• 2006 strategic planning points
• Improve physical and virtual access to
existing collections
• Action: Simplify/consolidate electronic
access to information and information types
• Action: Investigate federated search
interface
• Increase awareness of existing collections

4. Glimmers of Hope?
• Mergers => ?
• Faceted “next-generation catalogs”
emerged
• LibQUAL+ 2007 IC D-M scores up among
faculty (but even lower for students)
• Federated search? No, thanks.

5. VuFind - Brief Introduction
• Open source discovery tool
• Emphasizes recall over precision
• “Next-generation catalog overlay system”
• Web 2.0, and evaluative
• Tagging
• Facets
• “Did you mean?” / “More like this”
• User comments
• Syndetics information e.g. reviews

6. VuFind at WMU
• 2008 usability studies
• Overall, users liked VuFind better than
WebVoyage
• Students had a lot of suggestions for how
to improve

7. Improvement Suggestions
• Too many choices in the drop-down format list
• Change “ebook” to “electronic” in drop-down format
list
• Put electronic results at top - search results should
be sorted by format, then title
• Bigger format icons
• There should be a message "no electronic version
found"
• Make location/availability info bigger and put at the
top of the record screen
• Include more jacket images
• Make browse like iTunes browse function
• Make advanced search default, advanced search is
better
• Put facets bar on left instead of right

8. Implementation
• Need for changes/additions seen
• Some librarians wanted VuFind to work like
the classic catalog
• “requires a different mental model” (Houser
2009)
• Reorienting around the possible
• Instilled project management

9. Branching Out (and Forking)
• VuFind Taskforce => Tech Team
• VuFind formats working group
• Many revisions and additions to code
• WMU svn tree diverged significantly from
official svn tree

10. Format Mapping

11. Feature/Bug Management

12. Improvements
• Added format and location dropdowns to
basic search
• Phrase search added
• Author search improved
• Awards, author notes, summaries

13. Formats Dropdown

14. Awards Tab

15. Author Notes Tab

16. More Improvements
• Call number moved to top of record
• Dissertation search
• Improved new book search
• Complete subject string search
• “Previous” and “Next” buttons within record
• Links to MeLCat, WorldCat, Google Books

17. Grafting Back In: VuFind Forward
• VuFind 1.0 upgrade Spring 2011
• Merge/add our new code with official tree
• 7,823 lines of code modified or created
• Took a year, release freeze to accomplish
• Plan to submit our patches and changes
back to open source community
• Work is ongoing (1.1, 1.2)

18. Observations
• Web 2.0 features
• Tagging (total) – 566 users have
contributed 3850 tags on 1745 items
• Facets FY10/11 – of 478,136 search
results pages viewed, 33,407 limited by
a facet
• Comments (total) – 18 comments have
been added

19. Summon at WMU
• LibQual comments
• Informal comments from users
• Demand for “Google-like” search

20. Selection
• What is Summon?
• “First of breed”
• Cloud-based
• Search one big normalized database
• Metadata harvested from various
providers
• Database maintained by
SerialsSolutions
• Not federated search
• Avoids latency problems
• No clunky Z39.50 connections

21. Configuration
• So, what is included in this big database?
• Metadata about articles harvested from
various journal publishers
• Metadata harvested from our local ILS
• Metadata from local digital collections
(ContentDM, Luna)
• Metadata from various open access
collections (Hathi Trust, Digital
Commons, etc.)

22. Managing What Is Included
 Quarterly schedule for entire database
ingestion
 Daily updates
 Catalog updates
 New e-resource acquisitions and 360
Resource Manager configuration

23. What’s In Summon?

24. Phased Summon Rollout
 Clickable object fall ’09
 “try this new thing we’re
testing”
 Separate box spring ’10
 “search the new thing”
 Main tab fall ’10
 “try this first”
 Use skyrocketed and has
remained high ever since
 Became our primary path for
accessing full text articles

25. Summon = Power Search

26. Not Perfect

27. Comparative Usage
70,000
60,000
50,000
40,000
2010 2011
30,000
20,000
10,000
0
Summon VuFind SFX OpenURL Classic Catalog
"WestCat"

28. Comparative Usage – Google Analytics

29. Summon and Links to Full Text Articles

30. Acceptance
 Differing paradigm (discovery vs. search,
unknown vs. known items)
 370 million objects discoverable at WMU
(273 million are newspaper articles)
 46 differing material formats
 593 million total objects at WMU and all
other Summon sites

31. Summon Forward
• Updated at SerialsSolutions
• Knowledgebase updates
• Modified constantly
• Software updates
• Agile development cycle
• Problems and glitches remain: sending
support tickets and continuing discussion
• De-duping process improved
• Relevancy display tweaks
• Database recommender upgraded
• New features mean new
options/challenges

32. user
Web dev
proxy
server
server
(mailgw)
(squid)
Voyager SFX
server server

33. nextcat VM catalog
devcatexp VM (SVN) server
user
devcatdir VM
catindex
devcatsys VM server
Web dev
vmdev proxy
server
devcatweb VM server
server (squid)
(mailgw)
devcatindex VM
stockcat VM
catindex-backup
VM
cat-backup VM
Voyager SFX
server server

34. nextcat VM catalog
devcatexp VM (SVN) server
user
devcatdir VM
catindex
devcatsys VM server
Web dev
vmdev proxy
server
devcatweb VM server
server (squid)
(mailgw)
devcatindex VM
Summon
stockcat VM
catindex-backup
VM
cat-backup VM
Voyager SFX
server server

35. (Scott’s concluding remarks slide)

36. thank you for your attention
• contact us
• scott.garrison@wmich.edu
• sheila.bair@wmich.edu
• george.boston@wmich.edu
• www.wmich.edu/library/
• Summon: Power Search tab
• VuFind: Catalog tab
• Voyager: “Classic”
• read more
• 2011 ACRL Proceedings paper
• 2009 Library Hi-Tech article