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Discovery Curriculum for Patron-Facing Librarians

A curriculum for patron-facing librarians who are using Ex Libris' Summon discovery product.

What is it?

This toolkit is designed to provide you with resources to provide refresher or introductory training into how your Discovery platform works for patron facing staff, as well as ideas for how to use discovery in teaching opportunities with end users.

Who should use this toolkit? 

This toolkit is a good resource for:

·         New patron-facing staff wanting introductory training for the Discovery platform or those needing refresher training

·         Staff seeking ideas for using Discovery in teaching sessions with undergraduates or those new to information seeking

Discovery for Patron-Facing Librarians 

Recordings of training sessions for both Summon and Primo can be viewed at the following links. In these webinars, Customer Success Managers explain how the Discovery platform indexes, searches and ranks resources. They then go onto to demonstrate several basic and advanced searches on a demo instance of Summon / Primo.

Primo for Patron-Facing Librarians

Summon for Patron-Facing Librarians

If you would be interested in having this session run for staff at your Library, using your own Discovery instance, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

Ideas for Teaching Discovery 

In 2019, Ex Libris Customer Success worked with a consultant to undertake research into the search habits of both Undergraduates and Librarians. In this webinar, we present the results of this research and then suggest different strategies that librarians can use to teach Undergraduates how to use Discovery effectively. You can view a recording of this webinar at the following link:

Supporting Undergraduate Researchers with Discovery

There is also a search handout with citations and a bibliography of the research findings.

You may also be interested in our White Paper – How do Users Search and Discover?

Further Information

For more introductory information on how our Discovery platforms work, please see the following training videos:

  • Introduction to Summon (15 min) -  A concise introduction to Summon, including how to perform searches, refine results, save citations and searches, and link to full text.
  • Understanding the Summon Index (18 min) - An introduction to the structure of Summon, including what is in the Summon index and how Summon searches, ranks results for relevance, and links patrons to full text.
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