Hi Jonathan,

My library colleagues consider this to be an very important issue. For Primo, users must be authenticated by login or IP address for Web of Science results to be included from Primo Central, and they must be logged in for EBSCO results to be included (i.e. even on campus.) The Web of Science results are important for finding stuff we've purchased/subscribed to, there's a lot which is not otherwise covered by metadata in from the primary publishers or other sources. Journal articles in the EBSCO full text databases are well covered by Primo Central (as Ex Libris takes pains to point out) but stuff like market reports and country profiles aren't yet, and our librarians are keen for those results to be included. 

Rather than advertising the URL for the Primo search page, I came up with a way of putting a single search box on our library home page which, once a search has been submitted, checks whether the user is already logged into CAS (Single Sign-on) and if not asks the user to choose between logging in or continuing as a guest. A cookie's set to remember their choice. If they are logged in, or choose to log in, it redirects to a URL which makes Primo log in using CAS. Unfortunately it doesn't work 100% of the time, I think because the Ex Libris PDS (which is their own SSO system) complicates it so much that the query is sometimes lost from the URL during one of the many redirects. It hasn't caused any complaints, but it might be better to scrap the search box on the library home page and just have a link to Primo which does the login check first.

Cheers,
Laurence Lockton
University of Bath
UK

Date:    Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:16:27 -0400
From:    Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: 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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