On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 12:16 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochk...@jhu.edu>wrote:
> Looking at the major 'discovery' products, Summon, Primo, EDS....
>
> ...all three will provide some results to un-authenticated users (the
> general public), but have some portions of the corpus that are restricted
> and won't show up in your results unless you have an authenticated user
> affiliated with customer's organization.
>
>
I brought this issue up on the Summon clients mailing list a few weeks ago.
My impression from the resulting reaction was that people do not appear to
be overly concerned about it, because
a) most queries come from on-campus
b) the only results missing are those that come from re-published A&I
databases (which don't allow unauthenticated access), which is a minority
of content when compared to what is indexed by Summon itself
c) there's an option "Use Off Campus Sign In to access full text and more
content" users can use to avoid the problem.
Personally, I think it's little known, and insufficiently presented to the
user ("more content").
The key problem is that as libraries are increasingly offering their
discovery systems as OPAC replacements, users accustomed to the conventions
used in OPAC do not expect this difference in behavior. OPACs generally
show the same results independent of the user's authentication status, and
do not require authentication just to search.
- Godmar
