~EBSCO Discovery Service™ Helps Merge the Research Experience of Both Novice and Advanced Users~

IPSWICH, Mass. — August 30, 2011 — EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) has been selected by Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky as its discovery service. The seminary was looking for a way to merge the research experiences of both novice and advanced users and EBSCO Discovery Service allows its users to have as simple or as complex a research experience as needed.

Founded more than 80 years ago, Asbury Theological Seminary provides holistic ministerial preparation as an interdenominational institution. A few years ago the seminary implemented EBSCOhost® Integrated Search™. Acquisition Specialist, Robert Meeks says the seminary had a positive experience using the federated search and decided to expand the search experience for their users with EBSCO Discovery Service. “EDS continues our goal of making our large selection of resource tools available quickly and easily. It allows us to minimize the different places users might have to go to in order to find their desired resource and it works well to bring the majority of our resources all to one easy-to-use interface.”

EBSCO Discovery Service is also being used to support the needs of novice and advanced users at Asbury Theological Seminary. Meeks explains how EDS delivers the search experience that each user wants while also providing a broader and deeper range of content. “EDS gives novice users an even more basic experience than other previous methods because now, not only are they finding journal articles with just a few clicks but also books from our local collection and documents from our institutional repository. And our advanced users get even more information without having to go to three or four separate websites, but still get the same rich metadata they’d expect to see from publishers’ websites.”

Looking to the future Meeks hopes that together with EBSCO Discovery Service, they can connect their users with “improved quantity, variety and quality of resources in an experience that creates excitement and encouragement and limits failure and frustration.”

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 eBooks. The company provides more than 350 databases and nearly 300,000 eBooks. 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.

###
For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Director
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com