~Incoming Freshmen, Graduate Students and Faculty Able to Connect to More Resources to Explore and Find Answers Faster ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — September 7, 2010 — Indiana University Bloomington (IU) has selected EBSCO Discovery Service™ from EBSCO Publishing to expand the purpose and functionality of its library website. The university wanted its website to provide users with the search experience they expect to find from the library—moving beyond lists of library hours and resources to actual results. The university’s long relationship with EBSCO led IU librarians to be EDS beta testers and once they saw the interface, and the potential being discussed by EBSCO, they realized that EDS might be what they needed to make their website a starting place for users.

Indiana University Associate Dean of Library Academic Services Diane Dallis says EBSCO Discovery Service is able to give users a website experience that is what they have come to expect from online search. “The interface is intuitive and helps the user drill down while guiding them to the information they want.” Dallis says the university was attempting to make the library website more functional. “We had been able to lead users to databases in the past but with EDS users can launch a search from the library website and immediately return articles and other results. This is what users have come to expect online and we are finally able to provide them with the user experience they want.” EDS functionality will enable mobile access, RSS feeds, alerts, personal folders and citation management options allowing users to be more productive within the library website.

Indiana University ran usability testing with students during the beta period and Dallis says she received comments that let her know they were on the right track. “One student tester asked whether EDS would be available right away because he had an assignment to compete that day. Comments like that let me know that with EDS we were offering our students what they were looking for from the library—a single search box that is easy to use which points the novice in the right direction while incorporating the premium resources that graduate students and faculty have come to rely on.”

The university will be able to drive users to the material in the library collection from a single search box serving the needs of the first time users while also widening the scope of search results for more advanced users. Indiana University will also use EBSCOhost Integrated Search™ (EHIS) to tie in valuable resources that are currently beyond the reach of discovery. These resources include citation-only databases renowned for their indexing that are not available from any discovery service. These are databases that graduate students and faculty rely on for their coverage of a given discipline. EHIS results can be seamlessly integrated with EDS so users performing a single search query are presented with one comprehensive list of results culled from all their electronic resources.

IU hopes to integrate EDS into the campus environment through course management systems and by using the widgets and other customization options available with the EBSCO Discovery Service. The university will use an API to integrated EDS into the library homepage while also integrating library resources throughout the university.

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 EDS Base Index 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