Let’s face it… sometimes you just skim through those documents, websites, blogs or news articles because you just don’t have the time to digest it all. We all do it, but what if there were something that could help you skim through a document and quickly identify the key sentences for you? I ran across one such tool yesterday and thought I’d share my review with you.

Summarity is a software/website that condenses articles into digestible pieces. Through a “sophisticated yet elegant” process (or, as I like to call it… “Magic”), Summarity culls through the text and finds the sentences that seem most relevant. The result is something that (usually) sums up the article in a way that lets you hit the high-points of what is being discussed.

Summarity produces two types of results – block text of the summary, or a skimmed version that puts the summarized sentences in bold type. You can also use the Summarity bookmarks in your browser to block text or skim the actual website you are reading. As an example, here is Summarity’s version of the letter we got from Thomson Reuters yesterday explaining the field changes going on at TR Legal:

Library Relation Managers are a core part of how we service our clients – as are our reference attorneys, research specialists, account managers and sales executives. 

We remain deeply committed to fostering the library community through innovation, service, product excellence and corporate citizenship.

The changes we made this week are centered in two areas: 1) We have to utilize all of our resources to service our clients, and 2) we must do a better job of servicing the growing branch offices of our clients. This week’s changes aligned our resources across the company to give us greater coverage to more firms and more librarians.

Thank you, Chris Chris Cartrett Vice President, Sales and Account Management Large and Medium Law Firms Thomson Reuters

That’s actually not a bad result in my opinion.

You can also take the same text, through the Summarity website, and it will highlight these sections and allow you to skim through the entire piece.

The other options are to use the Summarity bookmarks to either block text the web page or create a skimmed version of that page. Using the same example as above, here are the links to view what it looks like:

The whole process isn’t perfect, but it seems to do a pretty good job from the tests that I’ve run on it. I’d have to say that I’m more of a fan of the Skimmed Text version than of the block text, but that may just be me being careful that I’m not missing something important in the text.
I actually used this yesterday after I got a long set of “new guidelines” on an upcoming project. Once the guidelines were put through the Summarity sophisticated yet eloquent process, I was actually able to identify the key aspects of the new policy a lot faster through the highlighted sections. 
Give Summarity a try and let us know what you think of it.