Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing, US, has announced that the Northern Caribbean University in Jamaica has selected EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to provide an easy to use and powerful discovery tool that will search the university's entire collection. The discovery solution from EBSCO will be known as SmartQuest and will be used to search all of the University's databases as well as the library's catalogue.
During the evaluation of EBSCO Discovery Service, Northern Caribbean University library realised that EDS provided exactly what librarians were looking for to broaden their library. Feedback received from faculty and students during the evaluation process was instrumental in the decision making process. Librarians say that the feedback helped push the library in a new direction – to implement a one-stop 'discovery' system.
In addition to naming the discovery solution SmartQuest, Northern Caribbean University has also incorporated other custom branding features into EDS including customising the page with school colours and banners. With EDS, institutions can also create custom pages for individual departments or subject-specific research.
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 comprises metadata from the world's foremost information providers. At present, the EDS Base Index represents content from about 20,000 providers in addition to metadata from another 70,000 book publishers.
