Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has announced that the Saarland University and State Library (SULB) in Germany has selected the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) to help the library consolidate its diverse resources and make them more readily available to library users through an intuitive interface.
According to Associate Director for Scholarly Resources and Collections Matthias Mueller, EDS will play a major role in providing access to the library's entire collection. It will satisfy SULB library patrons' expressed desire for a user-friendly search interface like the single Google search box ('Google-Schlitz' in German) in order to find electronic and hard copy resources available in the library.
Because EDS provides users with access to an institution's entire collection via a single, customisable entry point, the library anticipates increased usage of library resources and higher daily traffic in the library. Going forward, SULB anticipates that the continuous addition of resources to the EDS Base Index will mean more German content being added as well.
To this end, EBSCO recently signed an agreement with GESIS that will greatly increase the German content available in the Base Index of EDS. Covering all aspects of German social sciences, Social Science Research Information System (SOFIS) and Social Science Literature Information System (SOLIS) will provide information on German theoretical and empirical social research projects and German social science literature to EDS users.
Metadata from ECONIS—the online catalogue for the German National Library of Economics - was also added to the EDS recently.
SULB will utilise EBSCO's federation option, EBSCOhost Integrated Search (EHIS), to integrate German databases that are not currently in the index. Adding EHIS to the discovery interface will allow indexed and federated resources to be searched simultaneously from the same platform. These are resources that otherwise would be outside the discovery search experience but are able to be pulled into the results page via EHIS.
EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized 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.
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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