~ Strong Metadata and Subject Heading, Custom Subject Profiles and Evaluation of Multiple Services Prompt Decision to Select EBSCO Discovery Service™ ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — July 26, 2011 — Okanagan College in British Columbia, Canada has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing as its discovery service. After looking at other services, librarians selected EDS for its simple search process, rich metadata and subject headings. EBSCO Discovery Service was also chosen to attract users to the library’s resources and increase the use of those resources while also highlighting the value the library offers through the customization options EDS offers.

After conducting a usability study in 2009, the librarians at Okanagan saw the need for Web-scale discovery and had been looking to provide improved access to their growing array of online and physical resources. The Director of Library Services at Okanagan College, Ross Tyner, says EBSCO Discovery Service will offer students the ability to independently search across multiple databases and resource types simultaneously. “Rather than losing our users to Google, the library required a single place for users to begin their research that was easy to use and which returned reliable, relevant results.”

Okanagan evaluated a number of other discovery services during the decision process. Tyner says the feedback collected during these evaluations also helped librarians make their selection. “EDS allows for more customization than some of the other products on the market. The ability to easily and quickly create features such as custom subject profiles was a clear advantage.”

EBSCO Discovery Service provides users with many options for an enhanced search experience. Result list limiters and facets help to consolidate user refinement actions and provide options for basic and advanced users alike. According to Tyner, these limiters will be a big benefit to users. “A simple search process was essential, but we also wanted to provide users with numerous search limiters. EDS provides many options for limiting search results, giving users control over their search and their results.”

EBSCO Discovery Service offers libraries a variety of customization options. Okanagan College has integrated a chat box, customized the toolbar and the EDS footer and changed the color scheme. Additionally, librarians plan to incorporate custom links and widgets to ensure users can get help when they need it.

Tyner says Okanagan’s experience with EBSCO also played an important role in the school’s decision to implement EDS. “We have a long history of working with EBSCO. Our EBSCO representatives have supported us through database transitions, licensing agreements and the process of implementing this discovery service. We have built a strong relationship with the company, and with its employees, over the years we have been working together.”

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 producer of EBSCOhost®, the world’s premier for-fee online research service, including full-text databases, subject indexes, point-of-care medical reference, historical digital archives, and e-books. The company provides more than 300 databases and nearly 300,000 e-books. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals and magazines from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). EBSCO is also the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS), which provides each institution with a fast, single search box for its entire collection, offering deeper indexing and more full-text searching of 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 Director
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com

It is our pleasure to announce that Issue 14 of the Code4Lib Journal has been published. Please go to http://journal.code4lib.org/issues/issue-14 for these excellent articles:

Editorial Introduction: Prioritizing the Future, Collaborating in the Present, and Archiving the Past
Timothy M. McGeary
This is an exciting time for libraries and technology, and libraries have the opportunity now to build strong collaborations that both preserves our rich history and prioritizes our future. This issue shines a light on a unique blending of priorities old and new, detailed analysis of our past, and creative solutions that enhance the mission of libraries. Libraries big and small have the chance to impact our communities for the better. Come along, it’s going to be a great ride.

A Novel Method for Creating a Distributed, Collaborative Commenting Environment for Bibliographic Items
Rurik Thomas Greenall
This paper discusses a novel approach to adding user comments to existing platforms for bibliographic information, such as library catalogs. The application is built using simple and free services that support advanced functionality at a low price without requiring high-level technical skills. The strength of the approach described here is that it increases the number of comments available for display in any local catalog by consolidating comments from multiple sites and by clustering comments at the FRBR Work level. To do this, a central store of comments from multiple sites is created. In addition, the application uses ISBNs and OCLC’s Work IDs to consolidate comments from different publications (FRBR manifestations) for the same work.

How to Provide Live Library Information via SMS Using Twilio
Mike Beccaria
Paul Smith’s College provides library hours and workstation availability using SMS Text Messages. The service was implemented using an easy and affordable web-based API for SMS sending and receiving, from twilio.com. A new class of ‘cloud-based‘ SMS vendors make simple SMS-based services efficient and cost-effective to implement, and have many possible applications in the library environment. A simple PHP example is provided which supplies workstation availability over SMS based on a database of computer availability from a previous Code4Lib Journal Article.

Diva.js: A Continuous Document Viewing Interface
Andrew Hankinson, Wendy Liu, Laurent Pugin, and Ichiro Fujinaga
Diva.js is a multi-page browser-based document viewer designed to present high-resolution digitized document images as a continuous, scrollable item. This article examines the current state of the art in online document display technologies, and presents a list of functional requirements the authors used to guide the creation of this new online document viewer. The authors then discuss the image processing infrastructure necessary for deploying the Diva.js viewer, and present a brief discussion of how the viewer is currently deployed in their organization.

Using ImageMagick to Automatically Increase Legibility of Scanned Text Documents
Doreva Belfiore
The Law Library Digitization Project of the Rutgers University School of Law in Camden, New Jersey, developed a Perl script to use the open-source module PerlMagick to automatically adjust the brightness levels of digitized images from scanned microfiche. This script can be adapted by novice Perl programmers to manipulate large numbers of text and image files using commands available in PerlMagick and ImageMagick.

Book Review: 3 Titles from A Book Apart
Nathan Mealey
Three recently published books by A Book Apart, the book-publishing arm of the website A List Apart, offer concise, high-impact introductions to three tools that can be employed in facing this challenge: HTML5, CSS3, and content strategy. This article reviews the books “HTML5 For Web Designers” by Jeremy Keith; “CSS3 for Web Designers” by Dan Cederholm; and “The Elements of Content Strategy” by Erin Kissane.

MARC21 as Data: A Start
Karen Coyle
The forty-five-year-old MARC format, currently at version MARC21, is an obvious barrier to the provision of library services in a web-based environment. There is a growing consensus that the time has come for libraries to move to a new format. We cannot, however, decide on a new data format until we at least have an inventory of the data elements that are carried in our current one. Listing those data elements is not simple: over the years this record format has undergone constant change that has pushed the limits of the record structure and introduced inconsistencies in the way that data is coded. This article describes one person’s attempt to decode the content of MARC21.

Using Authority Data in VuFind
Demian Katz, Ralph LeVan, and Ya’aqov Ziso
The use of keyword-oriented next-generation catalogs in libraries has diminished the perceived value of the structured authority data that played a more crucial role in earlier OPACs. However, authority data can still be combined with modern discovery in useful ways. This article examines several ways in which the open source VuFind environment provides information to its users, showing how these mechanisms can be combined with authority data to enhance discovery. Topics covered include autosuggestion, context-sensitive recommendations, use of APIs, and means of harvesting and locally indexing authority data.

mapFAST: A FAST Geographic Authorities Mashup with Google Maps
Rick Bennett, Edward T. O’Neill, Kerre Kammerer, JD Shipengrover
When looking for information about a particular place, it is often useful to check surrounding locations as well. FAST geographic subjects provide clean access points to this material, and a Google Maps mashup allows users to see surrounding locations that are also FAST subjects. Moreover, the Web Service to the underlying data is also open and available for use. The map interface allows for simple selection of a location, with links to enter it directly as a search into either WorldCat.org or Google Books.

Joining an Open Source Community: Creating a Symphony Connector for the XC NCIP Toolkit
Michelle Suranofsky
When the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc. (PALCI) decided to upgrade its resource sharing software (EZ-Borrow) all of the participating libraries – among them Lehigh University – were responsible to have in place an implementation of the NCIP protocol to provide communication between the new EZ-Borrow software developed by Relias International and their respective ILS. This article presents the process of Lehigh choosing to adopt the eXtensible Catalog NCIP Toolkit, and the technical details about building a connector with the SirsiDynix Symphony ILS.

Web-Based Software Integration For Dissemination Of Archival Images: The Frontiers Of Science Website
Gary Browne
The Frontiers of Science illustrated comic strip of ‘science fact’ ran from 1961 to 1982, syndicated worldwide through over 600 newspapers. The Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the University of Sydney, in association with Sydney eScholarship, digitized all 939 strips. We aimed to create a website that could disseminate these comic strips to scholars, enthusiasts and the general public. We wanted to enable users to search and browse through the images simply and effectively, with an intuitive and novel viewing platform.

Time and resource constraints dictated the use of (mostly open source) code modules wherever possible and the integration and customisation of a range of web-based applications, code snippets and technologies (DSpace, eXtensible Text Framework (XTF), OmniFormat, JQuery Tools, Thickbox and Zoomify), stylistically pulled together using CSS. This approach allowed for a rapid development cycle (6 weeks) to deliver the site on time as well as provide us with a framework for similar projects.