2015 Charleston Library Conference

When the NCSU Libraries initially subscribed to the Summon Discovery Service in 2009, there were few other competitors on the market and none offered an API interface that could be used to populate the Articles portion of our QuickSearch application (http://search.lib.ncsu.edu/). Since then, EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) has emerged as a viable competitor. Using a random sample of actual user searches and bootstrap randomization tests, the NCSU Libraries’ Web-Scale Discovery Product Team conducted a study to compare the search performance of Summon, EDS and Google Scholar.

This session will discuss both the study methods and the results. Attendees will learn about methods that they could apply at their own institutions as well as how the Summon, EDS and Google Scholar fared in the comparison.