Subject: [CODE4LIB] Blacklight + Summon at UVA

From: Emily Lynema <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 13:08:07 -0400

In a recent Chronicle article about next generation catalogs, which also 
talks about Summon, [1] I saw a comment about the University of Virginia 
developing a mobile service which presents integrated results from 
Serials Solutions Summon and Blacklight. That comment has been removed 
from the article (weird!), but I also see a note about this on the UVA 
mobile site [2].

I am curious about how this will be accomplished, and figuring there are 
at least a couple of representatives on this from Virginia. Is this 
problem being solved by adding catalog records to Summon, or is there 
something more complicated happening? It initially sounded to me like 
there was integration of results across Summon and Blacklight happening, 
but it looks like perhaps I misread?

Regardless, any clues on when the new mobile site will be available?

thanks!
-emily

[1] http://chronicle.com/article/After-Losing-Users-in/48588/
[2] http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/mobile/

-- 
Emily Lynema
Associate Department Head
Information Technology, NCSU Libraries
919-513-8031
[email-masked]

---

From: Doug Chestnut <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 15:42:53 -0400

Hi Emily-

Our summon-enabled mobile site is here:
http://summon.latest.uvalibmobile.appspot.com
This version of the site is using a trial of summon and should be
considered a proof of concept at this point.

The more conventional approach (also the simplest) would involve
adding catalog records to Summon, but this option is only available to
paying customers -- we are using a trial of the Summon API.

Instead, we created a faceted search aggregator web service
(Blacksummon) that queries both Blacklight and Summon APIs
asynchronously, maps the facets, and paginates the combined results.

It's fairly primitive at the moment, but we hope to add social
relevance scoring (Amazon, etc) and sorting at some point in the
future.

If anyone else is using or interested in this approach, please don't
hesitate to drop me an email.

--Doug

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Emily Lynema <[email-masked]> wrote:
> developing a mobile service which presents integrated results from Serials
> Solutions Summon and Blacklight. That comment has been removed from the
> article (weird!), but I also see a note about this on the UVA mobile site
> [2].
>
> I am curious about how this will be accomplished, and figuring there are at
> least a couple of representatives on this from Virginia. Is this problem
> being solved by adding catalog records to Summon, or is there something more
> complicated happening? It initially sounded to me like there was integration
> of results across Summon and Blacklight happening, but it looks like perhaps
> I misread?
>