Hacking Summon

Abstract

When the Oregon State University Libraries selected Serials Solutions' Summon as its discovery tool, the implementation team realized that they had an opportunity to implement a set of "hacks" that that would improve the overall user experience. This article will explore the space between Summon's out-of-the-box user interface and full developer API, providing practical advice on tweaking configuration information and catalog exports to take full advantage of Summon's indexing and faceting features. The article then describes the creation of OSUL's home-grown open source availability service which replaced and enhanced the availability information that Summon would normally pull directly from the catalog.