~EBSCO Discovery Service™ Seen as an Essential Element in a Unifying Platform for a New Engagement-based Library ~

IPSWICH, Mass. —July 27, 2010 — Millersville University has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) as its discovery solution. While working with EBSCO as an EDS beta partner, the university found that EDS fit very well into the library’s overall goal of becoming an engagement-based organization rather than the holder of disparate collections. By adding EBSCO Discovery Service, Millersville has created what they call a unifying platform—a way in which the library will be able to make content and services available to users—improving integration in various student spaces and facilitating engagement with students and faculty while building on the power and familiarity of EBSCOhost®.

Millersville University Associate Professor and Information Systems Librarian Scott Anderson says EDS takes content and customization to a new level. “We are able to leverage more of our collection through a known platform—EBSCOhost, which is highly customizable and offers us the ability to push content and services to users based on specific goals and needs. We want to engage with our users and EDS gives us the opportunity to make content available in a holistic way, reshaping how the library is used and perceived.”

Millersville University was able to assist EBSCO in developing a process for handling standard file and record group extracts from their ILS that allows institutions to easily add their local catalog to the EBSCOhost platform. The catalog can then be included in a comprehensive discovery index or included in indexes specifically for a particular subject or academic discipline. In addition, Millersville has added a number of additional Dublin Core based special collections to the EDS platform to enhance the exposure of local content as well. EDS has a functional out of the box configuration and a simple implementation process while allowing customization options including profiling appropriate library subject specialists, relevant or related services and logical content. This facilitates logical placement of the library in spaces such as the learning management/course shell space, program or department Web presence and more traditional library guides.

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.

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.

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of nearly 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.
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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Manager
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com