Danish contribution: Search interface à la Web 2.0

The State and University Library's contribution is a new search engine.
Its name is Summa. It searches across a given number of data sources and presents the output for the user in a single search result. Summa also adds extra value to search results by pulling information from external web service based information sources, such as author bibliographies or images collections.

Summa's philosophy is simple: development must be based on user needs and user behaviour.

One important usability observation is that library users know little or nothing of the valuable resources and collections that many libraries maintain outside the library database. To address this issue, Summa mashes up information from a wide array of external web resources.

For instance, Summa includes book covers and editorial reviews from Amazon.com in search results. Also, music sound bites are collected from the Danish online music site netmusik.dk and are integrated where possible. Summa even includes information about the library's academic experts in the search result allowing for swift contact.

New and useful features can easily be added: If, for instance, a "Did you mean" web service is released somewhere on the web, and if it is better than the one we built, we can easily integrate it to replace our own, thanks to the modular design of Summa.

In the near future, our intention is to turn Summa into a Open Source project allowing any library to freely use and benefit from it. The code is not quite ready for that yet, but we are working on it.

Read more about the features at
http://www.statsbiblioteket.dk/summa/about.jsp and find all the technical details in our white paper at http://www.statsbiblioteket.dk/publ/summaenglish.pdf

Most important: Take Summa for a test drive at http://www.statsbiblioteket.dk/summa/ and feel free to send us feedback at web@statsbiblioteket.dk

On behalf of the Summa Team,
Jens Hofman Hansen