~Middle East Technical University—One of the World’s Top Ranked Universities—Selects EBSCO Discovery Service™ After Long Look at Alternatives~

IPSWICH, Mass. — February 15, 2011 — Middle East Technical University (METU) has selected EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing. After evaluating a variety of services METU chose EDS based on the discovery service’s sophistication and development. EDS was seen as a way to upgrade the library from an unsatisfactory federated search system and provide a service befitting the high level of students who attend METU.

METU is the First Turkish State University ranked among The World University Ranking 2010 from the Times Higher Education. The university is also ranked among the best universities in the world and the top university in Turkey according to Webometrics Ranking of World Universities compiled in January 2011 by the Cybermetrics Lab in Spain. Out of the 1.5 million students who take the Higher Education Council Student Selection and Placement Examination each year, one-third of the most qualified 1,000 students select Middle East Technical University.

EBSCO Discovery Service was among the discovery services evaluated as the university sought to move away from federated searching and EDS was the one discovery option that made sense. METU librarians have been studying, conducting research and performing an accurate evaluation on EBSCO Discovery Service and other alternatives for a long time. Librarians determined that EDS has strong content and an impressive development schedule that separated EDS from other services.

METU will also add EBSCOhost® Integrated Search™, EBSCO A-to-Z® and LinkSource® in order to add resources not available via discovery along with a Web-based resource listing service and a link resolver.

Middle East Technical University will introduce EBSCO Discovery Service to users under the name of METUnique Search with comprehensive customization features. EDS allows sites to customize their discovery experience including:
• enhanced branding to bring visibility to the library and university through logos, colors and custom linking
• a custom toolbar to determine both links being made available and the wording used to describe them
• widgets which allow functionality from EDS to be exported to other sites and imported into the EDS user experience

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 400,000 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, NISC™, The Philosopher’s Index™, PsycARTICLES®, PsycINFO® and RILM™. 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