Serials Solutions, a leading provider of digital discovery tools and integrated management solutions, celebrated its ten-year anniversary July 27 at Annual. I stopped for some cake and to check out the celebration: founder Peter McCracken addressed the audience–a slice of Serials Solutions' 3,000 customers worldwide–on the history and future of the company.
McCracken and the other original partners, brothers Steve and Mike–all of whom held other full-time jobs–worked on Serials Solutions’ first product out of a Seattle basement in their spare time. Today there are 175 employees providing a growing suite of tools, including Serials Solutions Knowledge Works, Serials Solutions 360, Ulrich’s Global Serials Intelligence, Aquabrowser, WebFeat, and the Summon™ web scale discovery service.
"Summon is the icing on the cake," Serials Solutions representative Beth Dempsy told American Libraries. The company’s newest offering, Summo allows researchers to instantly search, discover, and access the breadth of library holdings–no matter the format–through a single search box, transcending federated search and next-generation catalogs.
McCracken first started working on Serials Solutions in 1998, while a reference librarian at East Carolina University in North Carolina. During a brainstorm with his brothers Steve and Mike, they developed a solution that fit in with the emerging dot-com world: working with data from various aggregators to provide integrated indexing of a library's serial collection. Serials Solutions’ first product debuted at the Washington Library Association conference in May 2000.
