Case Study: Dartmouth College improves scholarly discovery with ProQuest's Summon service

Dartmouth College Library brings easy discovery to the full scope of its collections

Dartmouth College Library faced a disjointed discovery layer that made it hard for users to navigate the many services, catalogs, and indices needed to reach the library’s print and electronic collections. Users often defaulted to Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Amazon.com, missing scholarly materials in the process. Dartmouth College tested ProQuest’s Summon unified discovery service as a way to create a single starting point for research.

ProQuest’s Summon service brought the library’s content and metadata into one hosted index and let users search through a single box branded with the library’s name and logo. The system indexed about 117 million of the nearly half a billion records in Summon at the time, drawing from about 4,800 publishers and linking users back to the catalog or directly to publisher sites. Dartmouth College said the service showed real promise for making it easier for faculty, students, and staff to discover and use the collections it buys, builds, and leases.

Dartmouth College

David Seaman

Associate Librarian for Information Management