Library resources provider EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has announced that Lamar University, one of the fastest growing universities in Texas, has implemented EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). The university reports that EBSCO Discovery Service has delivered more scholarly content to students and has been successful in simplifying the research process by combining the university library catalogue with article content into an integrated result list.
Realising that discovery was the way of the future, Lamar University began evaluating discovery services. They wanted to pull students away from using Google for research which often resulted in taking the first results whether they are relevant or not. Karen B Nichols Coordinator of Reference Services at Lamar University says they initially turned to EBSCO because students were familiar with the EBSCO interface but they were impressed by the quality of the material in EDS.
EBSCO Discovery Service offers a variety of customisability options that build on the powerful EBSCOhost platform. Lamar University was familiar with many of the customisation options that they had with EBSCOhost so adapting it to EBSCO Discovery Service was easy. EDS provides customisation options to make the discovery service unique such as integration of widgets and creation of subject profiles. Nichols says they have named EDS 'CardinalOne Search' to correlate with their school mascot.
EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customised 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 its relevance and value ranking technology.
