Research has never been so easy: Summon at the University of Huddersfield

In early 2009, a project group at the University of Huddersfield was founded in order to investigate the current provision for electronic resources and to look at a solution, which would ‘provide ease of searching and access for the user, whilst reducing the workload for systems and technical services and remaining within current budget levels’.

As a direct result of this review, the University of Huddersfield was the first UK commercial adopter of Summon in the summer of 2009. Summon was soft-launched in March 2010, to enable a period of user-testing alongside the existing federated search service MetaLib, before a full launch in July 2010 and subsequent roll-out for the academic year 2010/11.

This paper will provide a case study of the implementation, evaluation and launch of this radical new service to users at the University of Huddersfield, by detailing the approaches used and lessons learned throughout the implementation and subsequent period.

The key aims of this paper are:

• To report on the challenges encountered and any issues raised during the technical implementation of Summon
• To discuss the feedback received from a representative range of users after the initial ‘soft launch’ and reaction from users since the start of the new academic year as part of the JISC funded Summon4hn project (http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/summon4hn/)
• Summon will completely change the way user education is approached at Huddersfield. The paper will briefly look at the benefits of the new service in relation to user education
• Finally the paper will look ahead to some of the implications for other electronic resources at Huddersfield