Summon Over Alma: Getting Everyone to Play Nicely

Abstract

Preceded by a series of fortunate events, Eastern Michigan University found itself, last year, in a groundbreaking role as the first library to implement the Summon over Alma infrastructure. I had the privilege of presenting about this experience at ELUNA 2017, exactly 4 days after our Alma instance went live and while we were still waiting for our Summon instance to go live. After a year of working in this environment we would like to share some of the things that have worked and extended this setup. Course Reserves functionality was introduced to Summon in July 2017, through trial and error we have created a standard method for storing Reading Lists that leverages the Summon facet display as well as creating our own interface using the Alma API. There are other issues that we faced and have resolved, for example user logins are case insensitive in our campus systems but case sensitive in Alma. We identified this issue and implemented ways to prevent failure and communicate errors to users. There are still other issues to which we are still hoping to find resolutions, for example the lack of redirected search links from the Alma Services Page when the same metadata offers this in the Summon interface. The common thread through all of these issues, is contending with the different ways that Summon and Alma work and are structured and getting them to work more seamlessly. We hope to share specifics of ways we have done this as well as inspire discussion and innovation to further the cause.