Even though Summon is marketed as a Serial Solutions system, I tend to think of it more as coming from Proquest (the parent company, of course).

Summon goes a bit beyond what Proquest and CSA have done in the past, loading outside publisher data, your local catalog records, and some other nice data (no small thing, mind you).  But, like Rob and Mike, I tend to see this as an evolutionary step for a database aggregator like Proquest rather than a revolutionary one.

Obviously, database aggregators like Proquest, OCLC, and Ebsco are well positioned to do this kind of work.  The problem, though, is that they are also competitors.  At some point, if you want to have a truly unified local index of _all_ of your database, you're going to have to cross aggregator lines.  What happens then?

--Dave

==================
David Walker
Library Web Services Manager
California State University
http://xerxes.calstate.edu
________________________________________
From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dr R. Sanderson [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 8:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Serials Solutions Summon

On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> On Apr 21, 2009, at 10:55 AM, Dr R. Sanderson wrote:
>> How is this 'new type' of index any different from an index of OAI-PMH
>> harvested material?  Which in turn is no different from any other
>> local search, just a different method of ingesting the data?

> This "new type" of index is not any different in functionality from a
> well-implemented OAI service provider with the exception of the type
> of content it contains.

Not even the type of content, just the source of the content.
Eg SS have come to an agreement with the publishers to use their
content, and they've stuffed it all in one big index with a nice
interface.

NTSH, Move Along...

Rob