University of Zululand in South Africa Selects EBSCO Discovery Service™
~ Rural Location, Limited Staffing and the Need for a Comprehensive Solution Impact the Decision to Use EBSCO Discovery Service™ ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — October 19, 2010 — The University of Zululand in South Africa has selected EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing to meet the needs of its students. The University of Zululand is one of South Africa's 23 National Universities but its rural location makes it challenging to ensure sure students are accessing all of the library’s content—if they don’t find the information they need, there is no other library to turn to. To provide users easy access to the library collection without putting a strain on the staff, the university wanted a single search box solution that did not require a lot of set up.

University of Zululand Library Director Laila Vahed says EBSCO Discovery Service was chosen after looking at a number of commercial options. “The University of Zululand has looked at other ‘discovery’ products. With all the other services available there is a vast amount of set up and programming that needs to be done by the library. Unfortunately, we do not have the staff compliment to support this. The EBSCO staff assisted with the set up and activation of EDS which made it far more attractive than the other products available.”

Vahead says the university has a long history with EBSCO and EBSCOhost® databases. “We decided to subscribe to EBSCO Discovery Service based on our previous experience with EBSCO. Our track record with EBSCOhost has been excellent and we were therefore confident in embarking on this project with a company of this nature."

Staff and student familiarity with EBSCOhost was also important. The EDS search environment is easy to understand and intuitive for students and that meant the university could implement a discovery service without the need to retrain library users or staff. The university expects to see an increase of usage in non-EBSCOhost resources now that they are available through EBSCO Discovery Service.

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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