What is Summon?

Summon is a new breed of library search tool.  Through a single search interface you now have access to content from collections across Libraries & Cultural Resources (Library, Museum, Archives) as well as from traditional bibliographic sources (journal articles, dissertations, newspapers, etc.)

  As a "Web-scale Discovery Tool", Summon operates in much the same manner as Google, indexing and optimizing the metadata from all these disparate resources in an single database.  What's that mean to the end user?  Fast results, and more accurate results than you've gotten from MultiSearch.


Here's how MultiSearch Works: Search goes out, processes and translates, then returns to you at varying speeds.


In comparison, Summon already has the metadata from all the resources it searches, so you're searching against a pre-indexed database:
It's a subtle, but important and groundbreaking difference in the way academic research has been done.