~ Consolidation of Resources and Integration of Disciplinary Repository Planned ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — December 1, 2011 — Saarland University and State Library (SULB) in Germany has selected EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) to help the library consolidate its diverse resources and make them more readily available to library users through an intuitive interface. The University is particularly excited about loading its disciplinary repository for the area of psychology into the discovery service platform.

EDS will play a major role in providing access to the library’s entire collection, according to Associate Director for Scholarly Resources and Collections Matthias Mueller. “We want to integrate our databases, publisher platforms, repositories, and our library catalog in one single search,” says Mueller, including “a special disciplinary repository of psychological literature the University acquired as a result of a national funding program of the German Research Foundation.”

Mueller says EDS will satisfy SULB library patrons’ expressed desire for a user-friendly search interface like the single Google search box (“Google-Schlitz” in German) in order to find electronic and hard copy resources available in the library. “Users are looking for an easier and more intuitive search interface. They want to have information instantly at their fingertips whether in the form of an electronic document or a book from the circulation desk.”

Because EDS provides users with access to an institution’s entire collection via a single, customizable entry point, the library anticipates increased usage of library resources and higher daily traffic in the library. Mueller reports that since EDS was implemented, database usage already has “increased significantly.”

Going forward, SULB anticipates that the continuous addition of resources to the EDS Base Index will mean more German content being added as well.

To this end, EBSCO has recently signed an agreement with GESIS that will greatly increase the German content available in the Base Index of EDS. Covering all aspects of German social sciences, Social Science Research Information System (SOFIS) and Social Science Literature Information System (SOLIS) will provide information on German theoretical and empirical social research projects and German social science literature to EDS users.

And recently, metadata from ECONIS—the online catalog for the German National Library of Economics was added to EDS. The German National Library of Economics—Leibniz Information Centre for Economics is the world’s largest library for economics and ECONIS is one of the world’s largest databases dedicated to economics.

SULB will utilize EBSCO’s federation option, EBSCOhost® Integrated Search™ (EHIS), to integrate German databases that are not currently in the index. Adding EHIS to the discovery interface will allow indexed and federated resources to be searched simultaneously from the same platform. These are resources that otherwise would be outside the discovery search experience but are able to be pulled into the results page via EHIS.

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 Saarland University and State Library
The Saarland University and State Library (Saarländische Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, SULB) is the central library of the Saarland University, providing specialized literature to university scholars and people of the Saarland. As a state library it collects regional literature and is repository library for the Saarland. The SULB is Germany's main library for scientific information on psychology and is funded by the German Research Foundation. The library houses about 1.8 million volumes, the SULB provides more than 45,000 scholarly e-journals and over 120 licensed databases. There are more than 12,000 library users.

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