Jefferson State Community College in Alabama Chooses
EBSCO Discovery Service™
~ College Was Looking For a Better Way to Connect Students with Library Resources ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — April 17, 2012 — Jefferson State Community College in Alabama has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) as its discovery service, becoming the first community college in the state to implement EDS. Excellent service and support as well as many positive experiences with EBSCO made the decision to implement EDS an easy one for Jefferson State Community College.

When looking to implement a discovery service, Jefferson State Community College librarians were confident in EBSCO’s ability to deliver an easy yet powerful means of accessing content from a single search box. “My experience with EBSCO has been that they are on top of their game, they listen to their customers and are proactive when it comes to making things better and implementing changes,” says Barbara Goss, Director of Libraries. “The most popular request is ‘a box like Google’ I have been waiting for EBSCO to do just that — because I knew it would get done the right way.”

Goss has also been impressed with the level of service and support that EBSCO offers its customers. She attributes knowledgeable sales reps and helpful technical support to the decision to purchase EDS. “Our experience with EBSCO influenced our decision to purchase EDS. I appreciate that my sales rep knows the products and believes in what he’s selling. The level of customer and technical support is incredible. When a lot of companies seem to be selling the same things, the strength of support can make all the difference.”

EDS offers many different levels of interface customization enabling the EDS experience to truly be unique for each institution. This feature was also a key factor for Goss. “It was critical that we be able to customize and were pleased that EBSCO tech support would help us with the customization.”

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 64,000 magazines & journals, approximately 825,000 CDs & DVDs, nearly six million books, more than 320 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 350 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