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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~ Metadata for PsycARTICLES®, PsycBOOKS®, and PsycCRITIQUES® Included In the Base Index of EBSCO Discovery Service™ ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — October 14, 2010 — An agreement between EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and the American Psychological Association (APA) will bring rich APA content into EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS). Metadata, including full-text searching, for three APA resources will be added to the EDS Base Index allowing the rich APA content to better impact searching through the EDS single search interface.

The APA resources included in the agreement are PsycARTICLES®, PsycBOOKS®, and PsycCRITIQUES®.

PsycARTICLES is a definitive source of full-text, peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific articles in psychology. The database contains approximately 150,000 articles from more than 70 journals.

PsycBOOKS is a database of more than 30,000 chapters in PDF from nearly 2,000 books published by APA and other distinguished publishers. It also includes close to 1,500 classic books of landmark historical impact in psychology dating from the 1600s and the exclusive electronic release of more than 1,500 authored entries from the APA/Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Psychology. Digitization of the content from the Archives of the History of American Psychology (AHAP) collection adds upwards of 2,500 works of historical significance.

PsycCRITIQUES is a database of full-text book reviews featuring current scholarly and professional books in psychology. It also publishes reviews from a psychological perspective of popular films and trade books. PsycCRITIQUES includes approximately 40,000 reviews dating back to 1956.

Linda Beebe, APA senior director of PsycINFO, says the agreement with EBSCO helps APA fulfill part of its mission to provide information. “We want to disseminate psychological science to the broadest array of researchers. Adding our metadata to EBSCO Discovery Service will help us increase the usage of APA content and provide the valuable information found in PsycBOOKS, PsycARTICLES and PsycCRITIQUES to users beginning their searches in EDS.”

APA joins a long list of publishers and other content partners taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content, such as: the British Library, Baker & Taylor, NewsBank, Readex, LexisNexis, Alexander Street Press, Web of Science (for mutual customers) H.W. Wilson and Oxford University Press. With partners such as APA, EDS customers and their end users benefit as more of a library’s collection becomes available through the most powerful searching components—deep indexing, abstracts and full text.

EBSCO Discovery Service is quickly becoming the discovery selection for many libraries (www.ebscohost.com/discovery/eds-news), and an obvious partner for content providers. Because the service builds on the foundation provided by the EBSCOhost platform, libraries gain a full user experience for discovering their collections/OPAC—which is not typical in the discovery space. Further still, in the many universities and other libraries where EBSCOhost is the most-used platform for premium research, users are not asked to change their pathways or habits for searching. There’s simply more to discover on the familiar EBSCOhost platform, and the same can be said for library administrators who can leverage their previous work with EBSCOadmin.

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

DALLAS, TX, October 13 – Amigos Library Services will present a one day online conference “Going Green @Your Library 2” on November 3. Going Green 2 will offer the latest information on environmentally conscious librarianship, from working green to teaching green. Working green will focus on green building, IT, and maintenance practices implemented in libraries. Teaching green will emphasize ways that your library can show others in your community good examples of how to be green.

“The topic of “going green” is truly useful in this day and age with librarians eager to do their part to minimize their impact on the environment” says Laura Kimberly, Amigos Senior Operations Manager, Support and Education Services. “With the conference online, it offers an affordable – and green – alternative for librarians.”

Keynote speaker, Monika Antonelli, will kick off the conference with her talk “Greening Libraries 2.0: The Next Step.” Antonelli’s talk will focus on innovative green developments within the library world, what logical next steps libraries should be incorporating to become greener and more sustainable and a discussion of permaculture design principles and how they can be applied to create greener and more sustainable libraries.

For more information and to sign up for the conference, visit http://greenlibs2.amigos.org/.
Early bird registration runs through October 20.

About Amigos Library Services - For more than 35 years, Amigos Library Services has helped its members obtain affordable services and share library resources and knowledge. With over 600 members, Amigos is one of the largest consortia of libraries and cultural heritage institutions in the United States. Through membership in Amigos, libraries collectively gain access to the latest innovations and services in the library community; pursue opportunities for continuing professional education; leverage their buying power; and preserve the region’s rich cultural heritage. This collaboration strengthens each member’s ability to serve and lead its community in the creative and effective use of information resources.

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October 13th, 2010
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
sales@bywatersolutions.com

ByWater Solutions and software.coop Collaborating on Koha EDI Support

It is our pleasure to announce that software.coop of Somerset, England and ByWater Solutions LLC of Santa Barbara CA, USA, are partnering to bring Electronic Data Exchange (EDI) to Koha.

EDI will greatly increase the functionality of the acquisitions module of Koha by allowing a direct electronic exchange from one entity to another, making processes such as billing and the transmission of purchase orders seamless. It may optionally accept bibliographic records from a vendor, making cataloguing quicker. It was described in the journal "Program: electronic library and information systems" Vol. 44 No. 3, 2010.

The EDI code, which was written by software.coop, will be rebased by ByWater Solutions on the current head of the Koha project. The rebased code will be submitted for possible inclusion in the 3.4 release of Koha.

About Koha:
Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. Koha's impressive feature set continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. It includes modules for circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, reserves, patron management, branch relationships, and more.

Koha’s OPAC, circulation, management and self-checkout interfaces are all based on standards-compliant World Wide Web technologies--XHTML, CSS and Javascript--making Koha a truly platform-independent solution. Koha is distributed under the open-source General Public License (GPL). For more information about Koha, please visit: www.koha-community.org

About ByWater Solutions:
With over 10 years of experience, ByWater Solutions offers customized hosting, data migration, configuration, installation, training, support options and development of enterprise class open-source library systems. Offering a 24/7 technical helpline, ByWater Solutions’ clients have the support system they need to make their software work for them. ByWater Solutions pledges to share 100% of all developed code to the Koha community for the strengthening and advancement of the Koha ILS. For more information about ByWater Solutions, please visit: www.bywatersolutions.com

About software.coop:
software.coop is a tech worker co-op providing web design, system administration, software development and other computer-related services. The co-op has offered Koha installation services, bespoke training and support since 2003 and is a member of Co-operatives UK that follows the Worker Cooperative Code. To help its communities, it promises that its software will be cooperatively-developed whenever possible. For more information about software.coop, please visit: www.software.coop/products/koha