Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has announced that Indiana University Bloomington (IU) has selected EBSCO Discovery Service to expand the purpose and functionality of its library website. The university wanted its website to provide users with the search experience they expect to find from the library -moving beyond lists of library hours and resources to actual results. The university's long relationship with EBSCO led IU librarians to be EDS beta testers.
The university will be able to drive users to the material in the library collection from a single search box serving the needs of the first time users while also widening the scope of search results for more advanced users. Indiana University will also use EBSCOhost Integrated Search (EHIS) to tie in valuable resources that are currently beyond the reach of discovery. These resources include citation-only databases renowned for their indexing that are not available from any discovery service. These are databases that graduate students and faculty rely on for their coverage of a given discipline. EHIS results can be seamlessly integrated with EDS so users performing a single search query are presented with one comprehensive list of results culled from all their electronic resources.
IU hopes to integrate EDS into the campus environment through course management systems and by using the widgets and other customisation options available with the EBSCO Discovery Service. The university will use an API to integrated EDS into the library homepage while also integrating library resources throughout the university.
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. The EDS Base Index 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.
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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