~ “Cowles SuperSearch” Designed to Move Beyond Traditional Silos and

Give Students a Natural Place to Begin Searches ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — August 17, 2010 — Drake University and Cowles Library have selected EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) to enhance access to scholarly information. The customizable resource from EBSCO Publishing will be known as Cowles SuperSearch. Cowles SuperSearch will search across multiple databases, the library's catalog, as well as Drake's Institutional Repository.

In looking for a discovery solution, Drake University was determined to meet three goals: increase the use of scholarly resources overall; increase the interdisciplinary use of scholarly resources; and enhance the technical and financial management of digital content resources. This initiative is a key component of the strategic “knowledge base” program goal of the library. In opting for EBSCO Discovery Service, the university determined that EDS had key components designed to meet their goals—an end user interface, providing a single search box with multiple search function options, and an advanced support platform designed to manage multiple digital content elements.

Drake University Library Dean, Rod Henshaw says Cowles SuperSearch is designed to streamline and enrich the process of information instruction at all levels by removing the silos researchers must navigate without a discovery option. “Faculty, both inside and outside the library, will be able to spend less time teaching disparate databases because students will be able to use the same interface for most searching needs—quickly moving students beyond ‘how to search’ to the content itself and what the library collection has to offer. Advanced students will have access to custom informational units that combine resources not just from a variety of providers but from a variety of formats not regularly searchable in one place.”

The customizability of EBSCO Discovery Service, including the ability to choose the name Cowles SuperSearch, was also a big part of the decision to go with EDS. Drake has added D-Space; the school’s Institutional Repository to EDS and plans to implement several specialized SuperSearch options such as SuperSearch for Education, SuperSearch for Pharmacy and SuperSearch for Humanities. EBSCOadmin™, the administrative interface behind EDS and other EBSCOhost® resources, make it simple to configure, support and deploy these specialized profiles.

The Cowles Library has acquired an extensive array of eJournals, databases and eBooks along with its own unique collection of digital content (www.escholarshare.drake.edu). A 2009 Affinity Group Study, a comparative study of 30 peer institutions, ranked Drake University third in the quality and scope of this aggregate knowledge resource—close to 30,000 scholarly journals. Adding the powerful base index in EBSCO Discovery Service to the Drake collection allows Drake University to provide students and faculty with an impressive custom collection of scholarly resources.

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 100,000 newspaper articles, 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 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.

###

For more information, please contact:

Kathleen McEvoy

Public Relations Manager

(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594

kmcevoy@ebscohost.com