Case Study: Western Michigan University improves library discovery with ProQuest’s Summon unified discovery service

Western Michigan University brings the future forward

Western Michigan University Libraries faced a catalog that was not meeting user needs. Its resources were hard to find, searches often required multiple steps, and staff felt federated search would not work well across a collection with hundreds of databases. The university turned to ProQuest, through the Summon unified discovery service from Serials Solutions, to address the problem.

ProQuest’s Summon service gave Western Michigan University a single search box for the library’s collection, with relevancy-ranked results, faceted filtering, and access to nearly half a billion records from more than 4,800 content providers. The library also connected VuFind to the new discovery layer. According to the case study, the result was faster, simpler searching that helped users find relevant research more easily, including narrowing a search from 160,000 results to 52 hits in a few clicks.

Western Michigan University

Scott Garrison

Associate Dean for Public Services and Technology