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    August 31st, 2010LISWire aggregatorLISWire

    ~ Familiarity with EBSCOhost® Platform, Strong Content Coverage and the Ability to Grow Leads Grant MacEwan University to choose EBSCO Discovery Service™ ~

    IPSWICH, Mass. —August 31, 2010 —Grant MacEwan University (MacEwan) has selected EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) as its library discovery solution. As a long time EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) customer, MacEwan was confident that EBSCO's familiar interface and deep content coverage would provide a strong foundation upon which to launch its new discovery service.

    Two years ago MacEwan was looking for a federated search system that would provide a single search interface for students. However, during the planning process, discovery tools eclipsed federated search as MacEwan's preferred option. Grant MacEwan University's Coordinator of Library Technology, Gordon Bertrand, says the university’s experience with EBSCO was a deciding factor. “We went in with a high-level of confidence in EBSCO’s ability to deliver content and make Grant MacEwan’s existing electronic resources accessible in an easy to use platform with strong support and development. As students, faculty and staff were already familiar with the EBSCO interface, MacEwan felt the integration of EBSCO's EDS service could be accomplished in a timely and efficient manner with the least impact upon its users.”

    Bertrand says MacEwan envisions EDS as a living project that will be capable of responding to the changing needs of the university moving forward. “EDS is a flexible tool and EBSCO is responsive to our needs. We know there is a demand for a more efficient search experience for the user and EDS allows us to provide a one stop search experience".

    The university is offering a number of resources in EDS via EBSCOhost Integrated Search™ (EHIS) a complement to EBSCO Discovery Service which extends the discovery experience to external resources that are not made available for local harvesting. MacEwan is also taking advantage of a number of the customizability options available within EDS to include value-added features such as widgets to Lib Guides, Meebo chat and RSS feeds.

    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 100 million newspaper articles, 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 any 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