Summoning the curiosity
There’s many library search tools but they seldom offer API’s to query them and manage the results as you want. Returning to the library API’s topic, Serials Solutions’ Summon product, a discovery tool that integrates the catalog and the subscription electronic resources, provides different API’s to the Summon index, the availability of items on the catalog and to a cover image resolver.
The API is queried through HTTP calls and the data is returned in XML or in JSON format. It is an interesting solution for the institutions that, as ourselves, are planning on integrating the resource discovery experience into their library website in a more personalized way.
The University of Michigan Library has build a Drupal module for searching through the Summon API. It is labelled as an experimental project but you can see it working on their ArticlePlus search box.
About this post
This post was first published on LibTechNotes, a blog from the Library team at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya to share our everyday findings, solutions and inspirations.
