~ Enhanced Accessibility of Digital Collection will Increase Exposure to Valuable Content Benefiting Libraries as well as EBSCO Discovery Service™ Users ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — September 8, 2011 — The fundamental goal of EBSCO Publishing’s EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) is to make quality library content available to end users and a recent agreement between EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) and HathiTrust does just that. The agreement allows for full text searching of HathiTrust content within EDS—exposing EDS users to the entire array of HathiTrust’s collection and greatly expanding their searches while maximizing the library’s collection.

HathiTrust includes the digitized collections of more than 50 major research institutions and libraries. The HathiTrust Digital Library combines the resources of the partner institutions in order to preserve these vast digital collections. A large portion of the digital library is made up of books that have been digitized in agreement with Google Books. Additional content includes digitized content from partners including university presses and individual library’s collections.

The enormity of HathiTrust’s digitized repository significantly expands the search experience for discovery users. Although HathiTrust offers a standalone search service, through EBSCO Discovery Service, users will soon be able to search HathiTrust’s collection of over 8.5 million digitalized volumes including over 9.5 million volumes, including more than 5 million book titles and 250,000 serial titles as part of EDS. Enabling the search of full text as part of EDS revitalizes these records by bringing them to the forefront of the user’s search experience and allows them to discover more of the library’s collection.

“For HathiTrust, access is key part of our preservation mission,” says John Wilkin, executive director of HathiTrust. “Resources that remain hidden will not be effectively preserved. While we will continue to support a standalone search of HathiTrust (maintained by HathiTrust), we believe that getting our content into the flow of where our users are is critically important. We are pleased to see the addition of EDS in exposing the HathiTrust content.”

Dave Mangione, senior vice president of product management and content licensing at EBSCO Publishing says the partnership between EBSCO and HathiTrust is a natural extension of the role EBSCO expects EDS to play for libraries. “Through the addition of HathiTrust, we continue to illustrate our commitment to make the best content discoverable through EBSCO Discovery Service and to provide the researcher with unparalleled breadth of coverage in one place. By adding a search of HathiTrust to EDS, we make the millions of digitized works included in the HathiTrust collection more accessible to EDS users.”

HathiTrust is part of a growing list of publishers and other content partners that are taking part in EDS to bring more visibility to their content. Partners include the world’s largest scholarly journal & book publishers including Elsevier, Wiley Blackwell, Springer Science & Business Media, Taylor & Francis Informa, Sage Publications, and thousands of others. Partners also include content providers, such as LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters (Web of Science), JSTOR, ARTstor, Credo Reference, World Book, ABC-CLIO, and many others.

The EDS Base Index represents content from approximately 20,000 providers (and growing) in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers, representing far more content providers and publishers than any other discovery service.

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.

EBSCO Discovery Service is quickly becoming the discovery selection for many libraries (www.ebscohost.com/discovery/eds-news), and an obvious partner for content providers. Because the service builds on the foundation provided by the EBSCOhost® platform, libraries gain a full user experience for discovering their collections/OPAC—which is not typical in the discovery space. Further still, in the many universities and other libraries where EBSCOhost is the most-used platform for premium research, users are not asked to change their pathways or habits for searching. There’s simply more to discover on the familiar EBSCOhost platform, and the same can be said for library administrators who can leverage their previous work with EBSCOadmin™.

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.

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