~ EDS Chosen to Provide Better Discoverability of Institution’s Resources and Increase Online Usage ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — May 29, 2012 — Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE in Australia has chosen EBSCO Publishing’s EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) to allow students and staff better discoverability of the institution’s resources and to increase online usage. The institute also believes that EDS will be advantageous in attracting potential students by providing the latest innovative technology.

EDS will play a significant part in helping the library at Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE achieve its goal to serve all the students’ technology needs. Systems and Knowledge Management Librarian, Susan Bodenham, says, “Part of our strategic plan is to look at improving the student experience and meet their expectations regarding contemporary searching techniques and we feel that EDS will help us meet these expectations.”

Bodenham says they looked at a number of discovery solutions and conducted surveys and focus groups to determine which solution would fit their needs the best. “Results from our surveys and focus groups indicated that users wanted a more “Google-like” experience.” Bodenham added, “With EDS, our higher education students and staff will be able to gather all resources in their specific field of study, and our vocational students will have a simpler way of discovering relevant resources.”

According to Bodenham, Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE is also taking advantage of some of the customizability options within EDS to tie the discovery service into the look and feel of the library. “We have placed our branding and colors into EDS to ensure consistency with our other web pages and we will be investigating chat and other widgets once we gain more familiarity with what can be done to enhance the library experience for our students and staff.” The Institute has also taken the opportunity to name the discovery service FindIt@NMIT.

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