The Modern Language Association (MLA) has signed an agreement with Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, to include [its] MLA International Bibliography in the Summon web-scale discovery service. The agreement enables the Bibliography to be discoverable through the Summon service...
The MLA International Bibliography provides a subject index to print and electronic books, articles and web sites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Coverage includes literature from all over the world--Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. Folklore is represented by folk literature, music, art, rituals, and belief systems. Linguistics and language materials range from history and theory of linguistics, comparative linguistics, semantics, stylistics, and syntax to translation. Other topics include literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts (film, radio, television, theater), history of printing and publishing, rhetoric and composition, and teaching. Compiled by the staff of the MLA Office of Bibliographic Information Services with the cooperation of more than 100 contributing bibliographers in the United States and abroad, it presently includes over 2.2 million records with 72,000 books and articles added annually.
MLA is part of a burgeoning movement of information providers who are choosing to make their content more discoverable to researchers, students and faculty via this groundbreaking service. Each new participant adds to the service’s ability to fully represent the library collection.
The Summon service has already been tested for its content scope and comprehensiveness by libraries around the world. For example, at Michigan’s Grand Valley State University, the first commercial adopter of the Summon™ service, Ron Berry, the library’s Director of Technology and Information Resources looked at the library’s top 100 downloaded titles from EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier and compared them against the Summon™ list of content. The results: 99% coverage. He then compared the top 50 JSTOR titles and top 50 titles from its OCLC databases. “In both cases all of the titles were indexed in Summon. This was compelling evidence to the power of a unified index and the ease of which our users could gain access to core academic titles,” says Mr. Berry. “I’m absolutely confident that we are providing access to the breadth of our collection. All it takes is five minutes of searching to see how many of our licensed resources are being utilized in the Summon result sets.”
The Summon™ Service launched worldwide beta testing in January with key content providers ProQuest and Gale, plus key contributors such as Springer, Taylor& Francis, and SAGE. Since then, the program has continued to accelerate with major publishing additions such as Ingram Digital, LexisNexis®, Publishing Technology – provider of the scholarly research platform IngentaConnect™ – ThomsonReuters ISI Web of Science®, ABC-CLIO, IEEE, Emerald, Scitation publishers, the Royal Society, scores of scholarly publishers and university presses, and more. The service is now available commercially and has been adopted by dozens of universities on three continents.
The Summon™ service is built with all-new technology aimed at addressing a fundamental barrier between libraries and users: the lack of a simple, obvious starting point for library research. This web-scale discovery service overcomes that obstacle, by allowing users to enter a search term in a library-branded search box, triggering an instant single search against its massive content store and the library’s local catalog. It then rapidly delivers relevancy-ranked results in one integrated list. The Summon™ service provides simplicity and portability (with a new mobile app) for users and exposes the breadth of the library’s content, allowing more resources to be discovered – a boon for libraries, who want to get more from collection investments, and publishers, who want to drive greater usage.
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