Library resources provider EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has announced that the Louisiana Library Network has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) to improve discoverability and help promote LOUIS resources to students and other departments. LOUIS is a partnership with academic libraries, state & private libraries, and museums & archives in the state of Louisiana and combines the collective resources of all members to produce a dynamic library consortium. EDS was chosen because of its ability to pull together LOUIS resources while also delivering a simplified search experience that provides quality results.
LOUIS members wanted a single search that is similar to a “Google” search for scholarly material. EDS takes LOUIS's vast collection of electronic resources and brings it together in one place while also offering better discoverability.
Feedback from the library staff and faculty has been positive, specifically with regard to the robust features and functionality of EDS. EBSCO support is in the process of working with LOUIS to customise EDS by modifying the colours, adding custom widgets and using a custom search box to search from the library's home page. Further customisations will be implemented based on user feedback.
Looking to the future, LOUIS hopes that EDS will become a good tool for information literacy instruction and also hope to integrate EDS with another resource to create reading lists for students. They also believe the implementation of EDS will be a huge benefit to off-campus students.
