Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

April 14, 2009 Serials Solutions Signs Beta Partner WMU and New Content Providers for the Summon™ Unified Discovery Service IEEE, Brill, IGI, and Australian presses bring new content to rapidly expanding service Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, has signed Western Michigan University as a beta development site for its new Summon™ unified discovery service. New content providers will also participate. Among them are IEEE, the world's pre-eminent engineering society, information technology publisher IGI-Global, international scholarly publishing leader Brill and a pair of Australian presses that expand the service's local coverage. The Summon™ service's contributors, which include the massive content resources of ProQuest and Gale, have expanded to more than 80. Harvested content now exceeds 400 million records in preparation for the service's July launch. Announced in January, the Summon™ un...

I joined the Summon product team at Serials Solutions this week as the product marketing manager. I have to say, it was the potential I saw in this streamlined information discovery service that was the tipping point in choosing the oppertunity over others. Just as Newspapers have been dropping like flies, acedemic libraries face a very real challenge of exposing the breadth of information in a streamlined fashion in keeping with the paradim establish by Google. Libraries are realizing that information if undiscoverable is meaningless in this experimental learning culture. Meaning, if the discovery process is not streamlined to the standards of the web search engines, people will pop out to the web and bypass all the resources behind the walled garden of the institution. Summon, unified discovery service soon to be released by Serial Solutions, aims to solve this problem... and it does as proven in early beta tests. More to come....