~Largest University in Europe - University La Sapienza - Plans to Consolidate Its Electronic Resources, OPAC and Digital Library with EBSCO Discovery Service™~

IPSWICH, Mass. — November 13, 2012 — The Universita La Sapienza in Italy has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO). Universita La Sapienza is one of the largest universities in Europe. EDS will play a major role in consolidating the library’s many resources while providing comprehensive and relevant results.

After evaluating other discovery services, Universita La Sapienza concluded that EDS’s deep and powerful search better suited its users. Acquisition Manager for Bibliographic Electronic Resources, Ezio Tarantino, says, “EDS is well structured and the sort criteria are very effective. Together they provide a comprehensive result list that will give our users and easy and powerful way to find what they need.”

EDS combines an institution’s entire collection with its extensive Base Index that yields a comprehensive return of content. The strong relevancy-ranking system from EDS ensures that users not only find relevant result lists but also the best results on the first page.

In order to help support many of its off-campus students, the University will utilize the personal account functionalities in EDS such as authenticating through email address credentials. Students will be able to utilize other intuitive features including search history strings, save/share searches, personalized and shared folders, RSS feeds and email alerts.

Universita La Sapienza plans to add its institutional repository including Ph.D. theses and will take advantage of customization features including utilizing graphic options to adhere to the University’s website and custom naming the discovery tool.

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.

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.

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 more than 325,000 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