Matthew Reidsma

Work Notes

Updates from the GVSU Libraries’ Web Team.
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Summon 2.0 Migration Status

This morning we “migrated” to Summon 2.0. There have been some hiccups. When we flipped the switch on Summon 2.0 this morning, this is what we got:

Summon 2.0 problems

I spent the day experimenting and working with ProQuest support. They don’t seem to know what happened, but I did discover that if we change the parameters of the search box, service comes back to normal. I had asked several times before migration if search boxes would be backwards compatible, and was assured they would. Even my tests over the past few weeks showed that everything should transition smoothly. It didn’t.

When reading the current Serials Solution documentation for scoped searches, I saw that even 1.0 boxes were supposed to be created differently than ours. I suspect we had an old syntax (routing to /search/results instead of /search) and the name parameter for our forms was just “q” instead of “s.q”. Interestingly the documentation says that 2.0 has simplified the fields to just “q” but in my tests this caused the results screen to be blank almost every time. Switching it back to “s.q” worked.

I’ve been working at manually changing all of the Summon search forms on the website, and here is where I am at at 4:45pm Monday:

Institutional Marketing is working to get the search boxes updated in the website template for the Library, Instruction, LSAC, and Scholarly Communications sites, IT is working to update the forms used in Blackboard, and I’m working to get the others updated (360Link takes 24 hours to push changes live, Course Reserve, etc.) This is a big job involving reworking a lot of custom template code, which is why I didn’t want to have to do it. Depending on how long this takes, some of the other migration projects that were scheduled for this work are probably going to have to wait until August or later. I’ll be sure to update tomorrow.

Quick Fix

If you want to get your setup working while we scramble to fix the forms, you can do this: visit http://gvsu.summon.serialssolutions.com and do a search. Now when you try a search from any of the search boxes on the GVSU Library site, they will work.

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