EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has announced that the Phillips Academy Andover, an independent, coeducational boarding high school that enrolls more than 1,100 students, has opted for EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) to provide students with a more streamlined search that can be customised to their needs.
In 2013, the Academy's Oliver Wendell Holmes Library began to explore options for a better search experience for their students. They wanted a system that would include the library catalogue and permit the exposure of all their subscription databases. Michael Blake, Associate Library Director, says that students are able to discover more library resources with EDS.
As part of the evaluation process for a discovery solution, the Library conducted extensive student user experience testing and according to Library Director Elisabeth Tully feedback about EDS was positive. Tully also adds that the survey elicited a variety of responses that are helping the Library to customise EDS to better meet students' needs. EDS offers multiple customisation options including widgets, subject profiles, branding and custom search boxes.
The mobile capabilities of EDS were an important factor for the Academy. According to Blake, the ability to conduct research on mobile devices was high on their priority list.
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.
