The Louisiana Library Network has chosen EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) from EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) to improve discoverability and help promote LOUIS resources to students and other departments. LOUIS is a partnership with academic libraries, state & private libraries, and museums & archives in the state of Louisiana and combines the collective resources of all members to produce a dynamic library consortium. EDS was chosen because of its ability to pull together LOUIS resources while also delivering a simplified search experience that provides quality results.
LOUIS members wanted a single search that is similar to a “Google” search for scholarly material. EDS takes LOUIS’s vast collection of electronic resources and brings it together in one place while also offering better discoverability. In a recent poll to library staff and faculty, one LOUIS member said, “Our users were missing a lot of good information from databases that they didn’t know about and EDS put them on track to find more quality information.”
Feedback from the library staff and faculty has been positive, specifically with regard to the robust features and functionality of EDS. Lisa Stigall, a network analyst with LOUIS, says, “Many of our members have been pleased with the EDS search experience. Popular features include the automatic citation feature, ability to limit searches to a specific discipline and the fact that the results screen is easy to use and manipulate.”
EBSCO support is in the process of working with LOUIS to customize EDS by modifying the colors, adding custom widgets and using a custom search box to search from the library’s home page. Further customizations will be implemented based on user feedback.
Looking to the future, LOUIS hopes that EDS will become a good tool for information literacy instruction and also hope to integrate EDS with another resource to create reading lists for students. They also believe the implementation of EDS will be a huge benefit to off-campus students. A LOUIS poll responder said, “Our off-campus students will have easy access to online resources from wherever they have Internet access. They can find what they need easily without the help of a reference librarian, when the library is closed.”
EBSCO Discovery Service brings together the most comprehensive collection of content—including superior indexing from top subject indexes, high-end full text and the entire library collection—all within an unparalleled full-featured, customizable discovery layer experience.
