Electronic Resources Blog

The method for locating ebooks (which are books you can read online in your web browser) in Summon has just been tweaked to make it the same as you use for locating online journal articles…

Finding Books

To filter your search results so that they only contain books, tick the “Book / eBook” facet…

…your results will now include print books (which you can borrow from the library) and ebooks (which you can read online).

Print books have a link through to the library catalogue…

Electronic books have a yellow “online” badge on them…

If we have both print and electronic, you’ll see separate links to both…

Finding just ebooks

If you’re not bothered about prints books and you just want to see which books you can read online, tick the “Items with full text online” facet…

Finding just print books

If you’re not bothered about ebooks and you just want to see what print books we have in the library, tick the “Items in the Library” facet…

We’ve had a few complaints recently that Summon doesn’t allow you save PDF files. This isn’t actually anything to do with Summon, but seems to be a recent change Adobe has introduced in their Acrobat Reader software.

If you find that the “save” icon is greyed out in the Acrobat toolbar…

…select “File”, “Save As” and “PDF”…

Alternatively, if the PDF has opened within a web browser window, hover your mouse near the foot of the PDF window to display a toolbar and then select the “save a copy” icon…

According to Adobe Support, the “save” icon only becomes active once a user has made changes to the PDF document. However, as the vast majority of full-text journal articles don’t allow you to alter the PDF, the icon remains inactive.

Since launching Summon last year, we’ve had occasional reports of users being unable to log in to access e-resources. In many of the instances, we’ve been able to track the problem down the cookie settings in the web browser.

In order to log into Summon, you should ensure that your web browser accepts both 1st party and 3rd party cookies from the library.hud.ac.uk domain.

If your browser is rejecting cookies from library.hud.ac.uk, you will see the following message:

If you need help configuring the cookie settings in your browser, please get in touch and we’ll do our best to help you out: library.support@hud.ac.uk

We’ve started putting together some guides for the major web browsers:

- Firefox 3
- Google Chrome
- Internet Explorer 8
- Internet Explorer 9
- Safari

The cookie that we send to your browser is a unique session ID string that contains no personal information. Unless you’ve selected the “remember me” option, the cookie will be deleted when you close your web browser down.

If your browser is configured to block 3rd party cookies, you may also experience problems accessing full-text on publisher web sites.

One of the most common questions we get is how to log into Lexis resources to get the full-text from Summon. Unfortunately, with Lexis, users are required to manually authenticate, so we’re not able to do it automatically for you (which is the way we prefer to do things).

Typically, this is the screen you’ll see when trying to access an article on Lexis…

From this screen, you need to authenticate yourself. Firstly, click on “Academic Sign-In”…

…and then click on “Athens Sign-in”…

From there, follow the prompts and you should find yourself logged in to Lexis

A warm welcome to everyone using Summon for the first time!

Summon is our new whizzy search tool for finding journals, books (both print & electronic), full-text articles, music scores, TV and radio recordings, archive material and much, much more.

Whether you’re looking for info about building brand identity in competitive markets, stroke rehabilitation in China, fluorescence and amino acids or even lolcats, you’ll find it in Summon!

…OK, maybe not actual pictures of lolcats, but you will find peer-reviewed articles about how internet memes propagate.

If you feel you need some help getting the most of out Summon, we’ve got basic and advanced PDF guides you can download.

If you run into any problems using Summon, or accessing the full-text of articles, please let us know about it and we’ll try our very best to fix it.

If you have any comments about Summon, please let us know. You can either get in touch via email or, if you have a few minutes spare, it’d be great if you could fill in a quick feedback survey

If you’re a returning student and you were used to MetaLib, we hope you’ll find that Summon is much easier and quicker to use.

If you’re used to using a particular database (e.g. Mintel Reports or Cochrane), then you’ll find links to those resources in Summon, or you can find them via our list of resources by subject.

And finally, if you have a list of favourite journals (e.g. Surgical endoscopy), you’ll find articles from that journal, alongside links to the journal home page, in Summon. Alternatively, you can view our complete list of journals.

Although we’re always working hard in the background to try and ensure you can get easy, simple and quick access to the full-text of journal articles via Summon, we can’t guarantee it will work all of the time — with access to over 34 million articles, it would take library staff years* to check them all.

If you click on a link and you’re not able to get the full-text, there are a couple of things you can do…

1. Check to see if you can access the full-text from somewhere else

If you’ve clicked on a result in Summon, you might see something like this if the link to the full-text isn’t working:

At the top of the page, check to see if it says No full-text? Look for more sources or report a problem. If it does, click on the more sources link:

The “Article Linker” page should appear and you can check to see if the full-text is available elsewhere — in this particular case, the article is also available on two other sites:

2. Let us know so we can fix the problem

Since we have access to so many journal articles, we don’t always know when something isn’t working properly. It only takes a few seconds to report a problem and we’ll endeavour to fix the issue as quickly as possible.

On every “Article Linker” page you’ll find a “report a problem” link in the “Need Help?” section. Just click on that link, add a short description of the problem (e.g. “full text doesn’t work”) and then click submit:

Don’t forgot to include your email address is you’d like a reply!

* if we checked 1 article every second for 12 hours a day, it would take well over 2 years to check them all :-S

Although the majority of journals articles you’ll find in Summon are available online, we still have some journals that aren’t available in an electronic format and you can only read them by visiting the library.

Unfortunately, at the moment, articles from those print-only journals are displaying as “full text online” in Summon…

When you click on the result, the only link you’ll see is through to the library catalogue (where you’ll find details of where to locate the journal)…

We’re working with the company that develops Summon to see if we can find a way of making the print-only journal articles display differently to the ones you can read online. In the meantime, please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this causes you.

Unfortunately, not every journal publisher supports the ability to link directly to the full-text page for an article. Occasionally this is for licensing reasons (e.g. Harvard Business Review), but usually it’s for technical reasons (e.g. the journal web site doesn’t have stable URLs for articles).

For those journals, you’ll normally need to click on the “Journal” link (shown in the image below) to get to the journal page on the publisher’s site and then browse to the relevant volume/issue to find the article.

To try and make it easier for you to get to the article, we’re currently experimenting with a “Search for the full-text” link for some journals…

…clicking on the link will initiate a search for the article on the publisher site…

At present, the “Search for the full-text” links should appear for LexisNexis journals and for some EBSCOhost journals, and, from the testing we’ve done, the links seem to work most of the time.

As always, if you’ve got any comments or suggestions, please let us know!