Experimental project

This is a sandbox project, which contains experimental code for developer use only.

Web-scale discovery is a relatively new service in the library world. If you're unfamiliar with the expression, you shouldn't be surprised. Web-scale discovery describes a service for rapid searching of an aggregate index of disparate sources many or most of which is content licensed by a subscription rather than freely available. One web-scale discovery service provider is SerialsSolutions with their product named Summon (see: http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon/). Other companies may have competing products, but at present SerialsSolutions' Summon service is the most popular. Summon offers an API for integration in other applications, and I've built a module that implements searching Summon from within Drupal. I'd like to share this module with other drupal users who may be clients of SerialsSolutions.

So far, no other modules performs this kind of function. There aren't any existing modules on drupal.org that interface with Summon, or any other web-scale discovery service. The University of Michigan Library's website already runs on Drupal, so implementing a Summon client within our library's website was a very attractive prospect. Other libraries have expressed interest in sharing or building on our code, and thus we're investigating creating a new module project on drupal.org.

The University of Michigan's demo is introduced at the url http://www.lib.umich.edu/articlesplus. Though it is the only example implementation I have to offer, it may not be a good one because we did quite a bit extra to integrate the features into existing portions of our site rather than implement them as they exist as extra blocks, etc. Having said that we were very careful to ensue that the module functions out-of-the-box in a generic theme. Though we still expect that any production website would want to theme this module's output so that it matches their site.

Project information

  • caution Minimally maintained
    Maintainers monitor issues, but fast responses are not guaranteed.
  • Module categories: Integrations
  • Created by bertrama on , updated