We have Summon at Dartmouth College. Authentication is IP based so with a Dartmouth IP address the user will see all our licensed content.
There is also the option to see all the content Summon has beyond what we license by selecting the option "Add results beyond your library's collection"
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2012 12:16 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] Q: "Discovery" products and authentication (esp Summon)
Looking at the major 'discovery' products, Summon, Primo, EDS....
...all three will provide some results to un-authenticated users (the general public), but have some portions of the corpus that are restricted and won't show up in your results unless you have an authenticated user affiliated with customer's organization.
So when we look around on the web for Summon and Primo examples, we can for instance do some sample searches there even without logging in or being affiliated with the particular institution.
But we are only seeing a subset of results there, not actually seeing everything, since we didn't auth.
But most of these examples I look at don't, in their UI, make this particularly clear.
This leads to me wonder if, in actual use, even for customers who _could_ login to see complete results -- anyone ever does.
So very curious to get an answer from any existing customers as to this issue. Do the end-users realize they will get more complete results if
they log in? Do you have any numbers (or other info, even if not cold
stats) on how many end-users choose to log in to see more complete results?
If nobody ever authenticates to see more complete results.... then the subset available to un-authenticated users essentially _is_ the product, the extra stuff that nobody ever sees is kinda irrelevant, no?
Anyone who is a current customer of Summon/Primo/EDS want to say anything on this topic? Would be helpful.
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