The Ewing Memorial Library of Forman Christian College, in collaboration with the Higher Education Commission, Islamabad, organized a Seminar on SUMMON Discovery Service & ProQuest Dissertations and Theses on 13 May 2015.
Rector FCC Dr James A Tebbe, was the Chief Guest of the event while Higher Education Commission Regional Director (Punjab) Mr Nazeer Hussain, was the Guest of Honor.
Recently, the HEC National Digital Library Program (NDLP) has announced a trial of two packages with ProQuest; the Dissertations and Theses databases and the SUMMON (Single box searching tool) for all higher education institutions of Pakistan.
SUMMON is a web-scale discovery service, described as similar to Google for accessing a library’s academic content. It provides a single search box for finding all items in a library’s collection including books, electronic resources such as e-books, e-journals and academic databases, multimedia items and other holdings.
The trial access to SUMMON has already been implemented by HEC and the one-field Search link of SUMMON has been added on the National Digital Library’s Institutional webpage. To highlight the features of SUMMON Discovery Service among the users of HEC Universities, the National Digital Library Program has developed a comprehensive training schedule for the institutions to implement the training directly from the ProQuest Resource Person.
The current Seminar at Forman Christian College was part of the same training program scheduled for the Universities in Lahore area.
The program started with recitations from holy Quran and Holy Bible. After that, the ProQuest Focal Person, Mr. Anas Abdelhadi, Senior Account Manager Middle East, briefly introduced the Dissertations and Theses Publishing Program and the SUMMON Electronic Resources Discovery Tools for maximum Utilization of electronic Databases acquired by Universities.
In his speech, Mr Nazeer Hussain, emphasized the importance of research tools like SUMMON and said such support is a need of the hour to promote the research culture in Universities of Pakistan.
Dr Tebbe, said that change is inevitable the world and the changing environment of digital information formats and its fast delivery through electronic media are making a strong impact in all aspects of social and economic developments in society. He thanked the Higher Education Commission for supporting research in Pakistani universities and taking new initiatives like the National Digital Library and the search tools like SUMMON to enrich information support for the Universities.
A detailed session was also held by Mr Abdelhadi about the Theses and Dissertations Publishing Program of ProQuest and the SUMMON Discovery Service.
Around 120 participants from 28 universities attended the information-rich program. The high-profile audience included the Deans of Faculties, Chief Librarians, Registrars, Directors of the Offices of Research, Innovation and Commercialization (ORICs), Heads of Departments and Librarians from the Public and Private Universities of Lahore.
