Some of the questions about Ebsco Discovery Service presented by SUNY Albany faculty 11/2010.

1. Update:
Ebsco Discovery Service
Public Services Forum
November 16, 2010
Elaine Lasda Bergman

2. What is in EDS?
Always changing

3. What is in EDS?
• Subscribed Ebsco Databases (bib and full text)
– Academic Search Complete, Business Source
Complete, EconLit, ERIC, Historical Abstracts,
INSPEC, LISTA, Medline, etc.
• Other Ebsco content
– Bibliographic info only
• 50K journals, 6 million books, 20K conference papers,
825K CDs&DVDs, reports, newspapers

4. What is in EDS?
• Partner Resources
– “Thin metadata” for all EDS customers.
– If we subscibe to databasess, full data will be
added (full text when available)
•Web of Science
•Alexander Street
Press
•Lexis Nexis
•JSTOR
•Newsbank
•Readex
•Scopus

5. What is in EDS?
• Customized Information about Library
holdings:
–Library catalog (yes)
–Institutional repositories: digital collections
and archives (not yet)

6. Some Clarifications….
“Available in Library Collection”
• Not really comprehensive: items from the
library catalog that are in print and in EDS
online full text.
• Will exclude many things that are
bibliographic content only in EDS, that actually
are available

7. Some Clarifications…
“Scholarly” vs. “Academic”
• Academic = geared towards an academic
audience. May or may not be peer reviewed.
• Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) = peer reviewed
journals only. May be some which are not
Academic.
– Ebsco adding “peer reviewed” metadata to 100K
journals, even when content provider doesn’t
have this limiter

8. Customization
If we still find these misleading
or confusing, we can relabel and
sometimes “turn off” a feature
(such as Available in Library
Collection).

9. Needs work:
Content Provider Facet
• Not comprehensive
• Not dynamic: fixed list
• Can sort by # of hits or alphabetical

10. Needs work:
Facet Normalization
Q: Why can’t we limit by document type,
language, etc?
• Not all included databases have these
fields
• Metadata described, coded differently

11. Question:
Why Duplicate Records?
• Particularly for journal articles
• Each record comes from a different
database
• Coming soon: “Super Records”
–Some providers prohibit tampering
(ERIC, PsycInfo, etc)

12. EHIS Component
• Federated Searching: databases are searched
separately from EDS main search
• Select to see results separately or merge with
EDS results
• Availability may change based on
partnerships, etc.
– Already added Scopus as an EDS partner
– Didn’t work out with S&P

13. What’s Coming:
Real Time Availability
• Full information about item status (loan type,
location, collection, status, availability) right in
Ebsco Record rather than link to Minerva

14. What’s Coming:
Foreign Language Searching
• Unicode compliance for non-Roman
languages
• Improved Asian Language CCJK searching
• Virtual Keyboards for entering non-
Roman characters

15. What’s Coming:
“Super Records”
• Composite records for Books and Monographs
– Links to reviews
– similar books
– others by same author
– literary reference center summaries (if subscribed)

16. Questions???