EBSCO SmartLinks+ hits a historical high year with the average links per customer increasing 15 percent – which means customers are receiving easier access to full text. SmartLinks+ is a unique rights-and-identity engine that triangulates the availability, ownership and location of full text — providing the pre-validated single click links that appear for articles in the e-packages and e-journals to which a library subscribes through EBSCO. With this vast amount of continuously updated article-level metadata, it ensures users have seamless access to their library’s online subscriptions without the need of a link resolver. SmartLinks+ utilizes a knowledge base of more than 56 million article links from more than 25,000 journals, dynamically inserting the appropriate links to full text directly into EBSCOhost®. search results.

The more a user has to click, the more likely the experience will be a frustrating one and the greater the chance that the person will give up before accessing the information he or she needs.

Serials expenditures are a large part of a library’s budget and your library spends a lot of time to provide the information that users need. The more a user has to click, the more likely the experience will be a frustrating one and the greater the chance that the person will give up before accessing the information he or she needs. When users are faced with two links (one that guarantees full text and one that is unknown), users will choose full-text links.

When a library subscribes to e-journals and e-packages via EBSCO and one or more databases on the EBSCOhost platform or EBSCO Discovery Service, SmartLinks+ can be automatically enabled — a benefit that makes librarians’ jobs easier and ensures that users can access all of the library’s full-text content. As soon as journal subscriptions are activated, SmartLinks+ to subscription content are automatically enabled in EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) and EBSCOhost databases. There is no work required by the library and when users are able to find full text easily within the library’s e-packages and e-journals, they are more likely to make library resources their first choice for research.