~EBSCO Discovery Service™ Called a “Good Fit” for Deakin University Library—Easy Access to Information, Key Agreements with Publishers and Strong Metadata Cited~

IPSWICH, Mass. —January 11, 2011 — Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia has selected EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing. The adoption of EDS continues Deakin University Library’s long history of utilizing new technologies to improve the student experience and providing innovative access to and discovery of quality scholarly information.

The university has long recognized that users have different preferences for searching and connecting to the information they need. The challenge for the library has been to provide clear pathways to sources of information for diverse user groups, ranging from undergraduate students needing to quickly find resources for their unit, to academic and research staff with more intensive research needs.

University Librarian Anne Horn says EDS provides a search experience for all those looking for a way to easily find the information they need, and find it fast. “Making access easy is important. Over the last two years usability testing conducted by the library has informed improvements but for Deakin University Library the challenge still remains: how to make access as easy and intuitive as possible. Our users have had to negotiate multiple search options on the home page, and multiple database options. Compounding this, our studies have shown that we have users in each of our stakeholder groups struggling to understand the connection between articles, journals and databases.”

Horn says EDS provides the tool to make searching easy along with the strength of content to make searches succeed. “The library is impressed with the agreements EBSCO has with key leading publishers to obtain, harvest and include their metadata within EDS. It means that for the first time, we are able to offer a powerful search tool that includes a consolidated pool of resources from key journal subscriptions and databases. This is a major first for the library and a milestone development in the library’s long journey toward simplifying the search and discovery process.”

The quality metadata EBSCO Publishing is known for is part of the foundation of EBSCO Discovery Service which Horn says was also a deciding factor when determining which discovery service was the most powerful. “In choosing EBSCO Discovery Service, the library acknowledges a key strength in EBSCO, and that is its commitment to providing quality metadata to facilitate the discovery process. This combined with a superior indexing and relevancy ranking formula that goes beyond simple title matching and extends to an analysis of subject headings, abstracts and the full text of articles, means that search results pull in valuable content that might otherwise go undiscovered.”

EDS offers a single search option to a custom collection including, Deakin’s own library catalogue and the university’s institutional research repository, Deakin Research Online. EDS will provide the solution for many users—a way to easily and rapidly find the information they need on a topic, regardless of whether that information resides in a purchased or leased book, DVD, or licensed database.

The Deakin University Library was also attracted by the high level of customization and personalization that EDS offers. Horn says EDS allows students and academic staff to change settings and set preferences during their search sessions. “The library is able to tailor the search interface in a number of ways, from the look and feel of the interface to the wording of labels and text on the search results screen. The ability to create additional subject gateways—the grouping together of databases that reflect the university’s teaching and learning areas—is a key feature that the library is excited to implement.”

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, NISC™, 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