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Last Friday a number of us got together to poke around in Summon with an eye for how to teach it to our students. Here are some of the things we found:

  • Giz and Bobbie have already taught it! They had some practical experiences to share. So far students and professors seem to like it.
  • So far, starting with all the pieces, then leading up to Summon
  • “AND” is the default boolean indicator. Parentheses don’t seem to matter.
  • Facets are the big thing! So far the library instruction paradigm has been to spend time up front structuring a really good search that will get you a short list of good results. Summon is built around just throwing something in the search bar, then spending your time with the facets, narrowing it down to something useful.
  • Following this: if you want to limit results to ZSR materials, you have to do this in the facets after the search. You can add in ematerials as well. Another hack we found is that by including “ZSR” in the search string, you end up with ZSR materials.
  • If you look up the name of a ZSR librarian, you’ll get their research guides, ordered from the oldest to the newest. (And see their picture!!)
  • The option to save items gives citations in a number of formats. Good for a quick citation, though for the in-depth bibliographies, Zotero or Endnote would still be better.
  • You can’t get to a fresh Summon home page from a search. You either (a) go back to the library website and start from the “everything” box, or (b) go to the search bar and enter in new information and click the button for “new search.” This is important to remember when you lose a category of facets. If it’s missing it means there aren’t any facets to narrow by, so you can’t broaden the search again without a new search.
  • We also developed a list of things that aren’t working exactly as we’re expecting, that I’ve emailed to Kevin.

All in all, we came across several useful tips and tricks and we’ll hold another session for folks who couldn’t make it in the near future. I’ll email LIB-L when I schedule it.