~RLUK—Representing Nearly 30 of the Top Research Libraries in the United Kingdom Chooses EBSCO Discovery Service™ ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — January 7, 2010 — A new agreement between Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) means RLUK will facilitate the cost-effective provision of the EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) to its members. RLUK is a consortium of 29 of the largest research organizations in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including the three UK national libraries.

The goal of RLUK is to ensure that the UK has the best research library support in the world and works to make actual its vision of the modern research library. RLUK began to explore discovery services in order to continue to improve the research experience at its member sites. EDS allows RLUK to provide a consistent search experience for its vast research community and to allow the variety of rich resources that are available in the library collections of it member libraries to be easily searchable.

RLUK Deputy Executive Director and Data Services Manager, Mike Mertens, says EDS offered RLUK a variety of options for the member libraries. “In keeping with the RLUK goal of realising the vision of the modern research library, EBSCO Discovery Service will provide our member libraries with the options they need. Whether we are planning to make an OPAC available or provide access to print and electronic resources based on library location, subject, or specific databases, EDS allows our members to leverage their resources as needed. EBSCO Discovery Service provides the foundation upon which our member libraries can create and support the best research libraries.”

Mertens says RLUK has a set of strategic themes defining the important role discovery has to play in the future of libraries. “In order to fully exploit the value research libraries provide, researchers need more effective search and discovery tools as well as easy access to print and digital content.” According to the organization’s goals, researchers need more effective search and discovery tools, coupled with easy access to print and digital content, in order to exploit fully the richness of collections. RLUK seeks to enhance its members’ ability to provide seamless access to added-value content and services, such as the full text of digitised documents, born-digital content in multiple formats, and document delivery.

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 RLUK
Consisting of the top research institutions in the UK and Ireland, including the three UK National Libraries, for over 25 years it has been successful in seeding and bringing forward new ideas, plans, projects, initiatives and services with the single aim of providing some of the best research support for research libraries and information services, for both their staff and their users, in the UK, and, in this global information age, effectively beyond. RLUK has sponsored some of the major free online UK resources in support of research, including Copac, the de facto UK Union Catalogue, the Archives Hub, a national gateway to descriptions of archives in UK universities and colleges, the award-winning SHERPA, whose aim is to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research output, and with the JISC, the 19th Century Pamphlets Online digitization of 1 million pages of pamphlet material for use by researchers and the UK public.

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
EBSCO Publishing
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com

Mike Mertens
Deputy Director
RLUK
+44 (0)121 415 8107
mike.mertens@rluk.ac.uk