We use Primo, but we've never bothered with their restricted search scopes.

What are the use cases for putting discovery behind authentication? We often require users to authenticate for access, but we don't mind outsiders seeing what we've got.

I imagine that if we did have something whose existence we wanted to hide from non-authenticated users it would be a special case, and we could expect the small set of interested users to know that they had to log in.

Ben

On Oct 24, 2012, at 12:16 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:

> 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.