~Single Search Box, Familiar Search Experience Lead Mississippi State to Choose EBSCO Discovery Service™ ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — September 21, 2010 — Mississippi State University has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing as its discovery tool. The university library was looking to bring all of its resources together under a single search box. 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.

Mississippi State University wanted a discovery tool that would integrate its databases plus its online catalog and digital collections. In selecting EBSCO Discovery Service the university is now able to provide students with this expanded capability while using the familiar EBSCOhost® interface. By leveraging the EBSCOhost interface as a discovery interface, libraries are able to offer the access to their collection through a familiar starting point—EBSCOhost—eliminating the need to retrain users or introduce multiple new platforms.

The Administrator of Systems at Mississippi State University Libraries, Stephen Cunetto, says EDS provides students with a single starting point to lead them to more of the library’s collection than they have been able to easily access in the past. “We are looking forward to showing our students the power of this single search approach to searching for their research materials.” Cunetto says single search and discovery tools will have an impact on the future of libraries and research. “We anticipate that students and faculty will gravitate to this service as their first stop for their research needs.” The university will use the branding options available in EBSCO Discovery Service to mirror the look and feel of the library’s website to further integrate the single search box option into the library’s overall services.

The initial release at Mississippi State University will allow students to discover the content found in the library’s online database collection and its online catalog. Future plans include adding the university’s digital collections. As with EDS iterations at all sites, the Mississippi State University collection has been added to the EDS Base Index to create a truly unique collection providing fast, simple access to the library’s print and electronic collections.

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, eBooks, 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