Summon: Database Recommendation Feature
- Product: Summon
How does the Database Recommendation feature in the Summon service work?
The database recommendation feature allows users to discover library resources in the context of their searching, rather than through a standard database A-Z list.
The Summon service only recommends resources to which your institution subscribes, and links to the appropriate platform based on your subscriptions. If you have not added your database subscriptions to your Client Center or Intota profile, you need to do that before the recommendation feature will recommend them to your users. For more information, see how to add a database to your library's profile.
Recommendations are triggered in three ways:
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When a user's search exactly matches on a local or community Database Recommendation tag for a particular database. Examples include "computing" triggering ACM Digital Library and "naxos" triggering Naxos.
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When a user's search matches the name of the database. Capitalization and spacing do not matter; in other words, the match does not have to be "exact" in order for the recommendation algorithm to work successfully.
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Through a proprietary algorithm, the Summon service recommends databases by analyzing the result set of the patron's search. When a certain threshold has been reached, based on the amount of records and the relative size of the database, relevant databases are recommended.
The primary triggers for recommendations are #1 and #2 above (local and community tags, and searches on the database names themselves).
The Summon service recommends a maximum of two databases at a time and all recommendations are based on your library's holdings information in the Client Center or Intota; the Summon service will never recommend a database to which your library does not have access.
There may be cases in which more than two of your library's subscribed resources may be relevant. In these cases Summon will choose two resources arbitrarily.
The database link that is used is the database level URL (custom or default) set up in Client Center or Intota. If there is no custom or defaul database level URL, then the database will not appear in the Database Recommender.
You can create your own local tags as well as control the community tags and turn on/off databases as candidates for recommendation; these customizations are done on the Database Recommender Settings page in the Summon Administration Console.
Related to the Database Recommender is the Best Bets feature, which allows you to create custom search results that are not necessarily collection related, and to tag them appropriately. For more on Best Bets, click here.