Summon, A Library Discovery Service

Search everything.

Search across the entire library catalog (books, DVDs, government documents) and most of the library databases (journal articles, images, newspapers).

On September 14, librarians Darla Asher and Shannon Spencer offered an in-depth look at our new discovery system, Summon. You can see the recording of their presentation below. The video is on the VidGrid platform, but should be accessible to anyone logged in to MyUTampa.

(Technical note: The recording starts a few moments after the presentation begins. The image you see on the screen is in the middle of the library's home page.)

Are you ready to start using the Summon service to do research at your library? This video will explain the basics of searching for content, refining the results using facets and filters, accessing content, and saving citations. Your library’s Summon interface will look somewhat different than this, but the tools and features are common to the Summon service at most libraries.

Starting your research in Summon is great because materials from throughout the library are being searched from the single search box.

A search on cat dog fish will retrieve items that contain all three words in the citation and/or in the full text of the item.

Not able to contact a librarian at the moment and having trouble defining your research topic?

Keep your eye on the right side of your search results, when you do a search you may be presented with helpful information for defining your research topic:

• An overview of your research topic
• Contact information for a librarian knowledgeable about the topic
• Related topics that might better fit your research question
• Research guides providing insight into the topic

Searching is as easy as Search - Refine - Get...

• Search:  enter your search terms

• Refine:  use the filters and facets on the left side of your search results.  For example, maybe you only want to view scholarly material

• Get:  click on an item to access it

Refining your search to get the best material for your research can also be done by adding more keywords to your search. 

Just like searching the open web, you can indicate a phrase by putting quotation marks around the words.  The query "teacher education" will find results with that phrase.

Moving over to the Advanced Search page lets you be more specific with your search.  For example, you can tell Summon to look for the author "Sally Smith", so you can focus your search on materials by "Sally Smith" rather than about "Sally Smith".

Click on the Advanced link to the right of the keyword search box to go to Advanced Search.

The Summon service contains billions of citations, and when you do a search in the basic Summon search box, you may get more results than you can easily work with. That’s why the Advanced Search tool is so powerful: You can customize the search to discover certain keywords in specific metadata fields (like author, or subject), filter out content types you don’t need, and much more.

Want a better Summon experience? We recommend using Chrome, Firefox, or Safari as your browser - NOT IE or Edge.

This guide is remixed and adapted from guides created by Proquest, BGSU and University of Wollongong Library / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.