Article Discovery Working Group Final Report

Abstract

The University Library conducted a six-month investigation of article discovery tools. As a result of these studies, the Library is pleased to have selected Summon as the article discovery tool for the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses. The library launched our Summon interface as ArticlesPlus on September 27, 2010.

The “Article Discovery Working Group,” a task force charged with researching and recommending an article discovery mechanism, completed two reports.

1) The Article Discovery Working Group’s Final Report [PDF, 8.7MB], includes sections on:

- Development of personas to help us put our evaluation into user-specific context; - An evaluation of Metalib, Google Scholar, and Summon with regard to these user-specific criteria; - A survey of the campus on article discovery preferences that yielded more than 950 responses; and - Recommendations to select Summon, based on the above inputs. 2) The Article Discovery Working Group's Supplemental Report [PDF, 700KB] exploring two additional areas:

- An exploration how much of the University of Michigan’s article content is included in the Summon product; and - User studies exploring how University of Michigan faculty and students might perceive the Summon product were it available.