CR2 Blog the knowledge blog
  • scissors
    July 20th, 2010LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    IPSWICH, Mass. — July 20, 2010 — In the coming year, Northeastern University will explore the impact of a one-stop “discovery” system on user research and has chosen to work with the EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS)—a unified, customized index of available information resources. The Library was ready to upgrade to a next generation catalog at the time when discovery services were being introduced and one of the main reasons Northeastern chose EBSCO Discovery Service was the familiarity of the EBSCOhost® platform. By leveraging this platform, EDS offers a single interface for discovery of a library’s entire collection and the powerful features to heighten the research experience, providing everything the researcher needs in one place.

    Northeastern University Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources, Amira Aaron, says the timing was just right for the university. “We were not satisfied with the federated search experience and wanted to provide a more streamlined way for our community to discover information in multiple resources, including our local repositories and open access content. Northeastern students know the EBSCOhost platform and by introducing EDS we are able to provide additional content and include our catalog, all within a familiar environment which means an easy transition for students and staff.”

    Northeastern will work with EBSCO in the next several months to add its Institutional Repository and local digitized content into EDS, providing even more content from the single search interface—creating a truly custom collection. The ability to pull these additional resources into the EBSCOhost platform was another reason for choosing EBSCO Discovery Service. Aaron says, “We want to provide our students with as much content as possible from our discovery service and eliminate multiple silos of information, while improving access to previously underused resources. We also look forward to working with EBSCO and our counterparts at other institutions on further enhancements to the service.”

    EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box—searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.

    The Base Index for EBSCO Discovery Service forms the foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. Beginning with the Base Index, each institution extends the reach of EDS by adding appropriate resources including its catalog, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes. It is this combination that allows a single, comprehensive, custom solution for discovering the value of any library’s collection.

    The EDS Base Index is comprised of metadata from the world’s foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers. Although constantly growing, today the EDS Base Index provides metadata for nearly 50,000 Magazines & Journals, approximately 825,000 CDs & DVDs, nearly six million books, more than 20,000 conference proceedings and hundreds of thousands of additional information sources from various source-types.

    About EBSCO Publishing
    EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of more than 300 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as Academic Search™, Business Source®, CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Literary Reference Center™, MasterFILE™, NoveList®, SocINDEX™ and SPORTDiscus™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as ATLA Religion Database™, EconLit, Inspec®, MEDLINE®, MLA International Bibliography, The Philosopher’s Index™, PsycARTICLES® and PsycINFO®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. EBSCO is the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service™ a core collection of locally-indexed metadata creating a unified index of an institution’s resources within a single, customizable search point providing everything the researcher needs in one place—fast, simple access to the library’s full text content, deeper indexing and more full-text searching of more journals and magazines than and other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com.

    EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.
    ###
    For more information, please contact:
    Kathleen McEvoy
    Public Relations Manager
    (800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
    kmcevoy@ebscohost.com