Reference at Newman Library

Tag: Summon

OneSearch to Launch at Baruch on Thursday October 30

This Thursday (October 30), we will officially launch OneSearch on the library’s home page. You’ll see a redesigned yellow search bar that has the following options:

  • OneSearch (this will search all of OneSearch and will yield article records as well as records imported into OneSearch from our catalog)
  • Articles (this will no longer search Bearcat Search but instead OneSearch’s articles)
  • Books (this still searches the the library catalog)
  • Journals (this still searches our A-Z journals list from Serials Solutions)
  • Our Website (this still searches our library website using the the Google Search Appliance)

You can try out OneSearch right now using this direct link to it or by looking for the link to it that is on our A-Z list of databases.

Other sources of info about OneSearch

Problem with “Articles” Search Is Now Fixed

The issue reported here last week that identified an occasional problem connecting to full text from search results pages in “Articles” search (AKA Summon and Bearcat Search) has been resolved. It turned out to be a problem with settings in SFX, our system overseen by CUNY OLS that powers the “Find it! @ CUNY” service.

As always, please share any instances with Mike Waldman where you get a “Find it! @ CUNY” menu that fails to connect to the right article or other resource. Details to include in your communication with Mike are:

  • what database you were in when you clicked on the “Find it! @ CUNY” button
  • what article you were trying to track down
  • the URL for the “Find it! @ CUNY” menu (every one that gets generated has a unique URL that provides key info for troubleshooting)

Problem with “Articles” Search (UPDATE: Now Fixed)

UPDATE 09/12/2014: This problem is now fixed.

 

If you do an “Articles” search from the yellow search bar on the library website (this searches Bearcat Search, our instance of Summon), you’ll get some articles in the search results that won’t let you connect to the full text. In any search you do, about 50% of the articles will link directly to the article with no problem. The other half rely on SFX to generate a “Find it! @ CUNY” menu that will lead to the article. For those that rely on SFX menus, the linking system is not working properly.

For an example of this, run this “Articles” search for “homophily” and click on the first item in the search results: “Homophily in Peer Groups” from the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics. If you click on the article title or the “Full Text Online” link, you’ll get a SFX menu that fails to list the places we actually have online access to this article (we have it in EconLit)

Until we can get to the bottom of this problem, users who run into this problem can go to the “Journals” search on the library home page and use that to figure out what database has access to any publication that is inaccessible via the “Articles” search.

Harvard Business School Case Studies

To help chip away at the problem of people looking for Harvard Business School case studies in our online collections, I’ve added a trigger in Bearcat Search (what is behind the scenes on the “Articles” search on the library home page) so that if the user searches for them there, they’ll get this canned message at the top of their search results:

Harvard Business Case Studies

  • Not available in any library or database
  • Publisher requires each person must purchase their own copies direct from the publisher’s website

Here’s how it looks on the search results page:

Bearcat Search--best bet--Harvad Business case studies

 

In the admin settings for Bearcat Search, we’re able to create these custom messages and make them appear when users enter search terms that match ones we’ve decided will trigger the message. Here are the search terms that are currently set to trigger this message:

  • harvard business case studies
  • harvard case studies
  • harvard case study
  • case study
  • case studies

If anyone has suggestions about additional trigger search words we should be using, please add them to the comments section of this post.

Bearcat Search Re-launched Using Summon

Today, we have launched the newest iteration of Bearcat Search. The technology under the hood for Bearcat Search will no longer be 360 Search (a federated search tool) but instead Summon (a discovery layer tool). With Summon, we now have a much faster and more reliable search tool offering a friendly and easily navigable interface. If you go to the databases page and click on the Bearcat Search log now, it will take you to the new, Summon-powered version.

Here are some tips for searching:

  • Use quotation marks for phrases
  • Boolean operators must be typed in all caps (AND, OR, NOT)
  • Users can skip AND and NOT and instead use the plus sign and minus sign
    • dogs AND cats is the same search as +dogs +cats
    • dogs -puppies is the same search as as dogs NOT puppies
  • Use an asterisk for truncation and a question mark for wildcards

By default, when you search, you should only be finding items that have have full text access to in our of databases. Just as in JSTOR, you can expand the search to go beyond just the items in our collection; look for the checkbox in the the top left corner of the search results page or the advanced search screen labeled “Include results from outside your library’s collection.”

The items indexed in Summon are mostly articles and ebooks. As was the case with 360 Search, Summon won’t help you find numerical data, images, and other non-bibiographic formats of information. Also, we decided not to include records from our catalog in Summon (Summon lets subscribing libraries upload catalog records as well as records from other local collections). Details on coverage for Summon can be found on the Serials Solutions website.

In most instances, any item on the search results page that you click on will take you to an SFX menu that will show you your options for accessing that content; the remainder of time, a click will take you straight to the full text. In the coming year, the percentage of items that require SFX to get you to the full text will decrease and the percentage that feature a direct link will increase (this improvement is part of the vendor’s overall plan to make Summon less reliant on link resolvers like SFX).

Mike Waldman and I are trying to gauge interest in having a training session for this database. If you are interested, please leave a comment here on this post or contact us directly. Also, if you have any questions or problems with the new Bearcat Search, please let us know.