Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced that the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) will benefit from the formal merging of EBSCO A-to-Z and LinkSource into EBSCO’s overall discovery solution. The two resources, which are relied upon by thousands of universities and other institutions around the globe, will become an integrated part of EBSCO Discovery Service. The EDS technology and service teams will work to provide additional value for EDS customers via a seamless integration of the services with EBSCO Discovery Service.
While EDS is currently able to leverage the EBSCO A-to-Z knowledgebase to facilitate quality linking and limiting for a customer’s holdings, regardless of which resource listing product a customer subscribes to, this change will allow EDS customers to gain unique functionality in EDS. Complete browsing of a library’s e-resources will be possible within the same experience in which users conduct their keyword discovery searches. EBSCO A-to-Z and EDS customers will also reap the benefits of a unified administrative tool (under EBSCOadmin) that will allow for streamlined management process for all products.
EBSCO plans to begin the process for integrating the services over the coming months, and will be conducting focus groups and engaging customers to ensure the greatest possible value upon initial integration. The company is planning the facilitation of a formal customer-driven EDS User Group Meeting that is currently planned to take place in summer of 2012.
EDS 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.
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 catalogue, 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.
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