The release below announces that HAN University has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service and details the reasons for choosing it. The release can also be found here:
at http://www.prweb.com/releases/EDS/HANUniv/prweb10532316.htm

Thank you,

Lisa

HAN University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands Selects
EBSCO Discovery Service™
~ EBSCO Discovery Service™ Chosen as Library Discovery Solution
Based on Functionality and Coverage~

IPSWICH, Mass. — March 19, 2013 — HAN University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) to provide easier access and increased usage of the institution’s resources. HAN University is one of the top universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands and believes implementing EDS is an essential element for a top university.

With a selection of almost every type of professional course, HAN University was seeking a discovery solution providing excellent coverage in many areas. Librarians at HAN University looked at a number of discovery solutions and appreciated that EBSCO is constantly looking to expand coverage, including the addition of Dutch content. HAN University’s Coordinator of the Digital Study Center, Maarten Hekman, says the decision to go with EBSCO Discovery Service was strongly influenced by the fact that EDS delivers the content and breadth of coverage they need. “Our old service was slow and yielded less and less results than the students and staff were expecting. We looked at a number of discovery solutions and EDS provided the best content and coverage for our needs—there was no reason not to choose EDS”.

HAN University is one of many institutions worldwide that were influenced by the content coverage in EDS. EDS provides content from approximately 20,000 providers and includes partners from the world’s largest scholarly journal and book publishers. EDS draws upon EBSCO's extensive publisher relationships to feature a far more robust collection of rich metadata for most indexed content, ensuring that users can obtain the most relevant search results for their queries.

Due to the extensive coverage, Hekman hopes that EDS will lead to increased usage of the library’s resources and databases. “We are excited to see what impact EDS will have on our users’ experience. We feel a lot more students will find what they need in just a few clicks”.
Heckman says librarians were also impressed with the technical support that EBSCO offered throughout the set up process—particularly the ease of setting up guest access for non-authorized users. Guest access allows unauthenticated users to access the data through EDS. Hekman says, “EBSCO’s support team quickly arranged proxy setup for guest access. We were very pleased with how efficient they were and we are very happy with this feature.”

Another important part of the university’s decision was that EBSCO Discovery Service is the only discovery service to provide platform blending. Through platform blending, EDS allows information from important subject indexes that don’t otherwise participate in discovery services to be infused into the EDS result list. Because these full records can’t be made freely available on the Web (much like full text), EDS provides limited detail from these resources which is displayed in a guest access record, authentication is required to see the complete detail of the records. No other discovery services is able to incorporate full records from these important subject index resources.

While many discovery services offer guest access, there are a select few components that are not available in other discovery services and require authentication to view in EDS. These components are a unique benefit to EDS customers. EDS is the only discovery service that displays PDF full text (when available) directly in the result list. When clicking on the full-text PDF icon, guest access users would be prompted to log in, and would remain authenticated for the remainder of their session making it an easier experience for the user. EDS offers a cleaner, simpler process for requesting authentication to access full text, with far fewer clicks than other discovery services.

HAN University took advantage of customizations to make EDS its own. The discovery service has been branded as HANQuest and 19 different profiles were created to accommodate the needs of users. Hekman was particularly pleased that librarians could set up widgets for the website of the HAN Study Centres in three different languages (Dutch, English and German) each linking directly to EDS in the corresponding language. Hekman noted that with EDS they are able to offer their students a service that is, “faster and more precise.”

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 provides a foundation upon which each EDS subscribing library builds out its custom collection. 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 375 databases and more than 370,000 e-book titles to choose from. 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