IPSWICH, Mass. — March 19, 2013 — HAN University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands has chosen EBSCO Publishing’s EBSCO Discovery Service™(EDS) to provide easier access and increased usage of the institution’s resources. HAN University strives to be one of the top universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands and they believe implementing EDS will help with this goal.
With a selection of almost every type of professional course, HAN University sought a discovery solution that provided excellent coverage in many areas and appreciates that EBSCO is constantly looking to expand coverage, including the addition of Dutch content. HAN University’s Coordinator of the Digital Study Center, Maarten Hekman,says their decision to go with EDS was strongly influenced by the fact that EDS delivered the content and breadth of coverage they needed. “Our old service was slow and yielded less and less results that they students and staff were expecting. We looked at a number of discovery solutions and EDS provided the best content and coverage for our needs – there was no reason not to choose EDS.”
HAN University took advantage of customizations to make EDS its own. They have branded the discovery service, HANQuest, and created 19 different profiles to accommodate the needs of their users. Hekman was particularly pleased that they could set up widgets for the website of the HAN Study Centres in three different languages (Dutch, English and German) each linking directly to EDS in the corresponding language. Hekman noted that with EDS they are able to offer their students a service that is “faster and more precise now.”
HAN University is one of many institutions worldwide that were influenced by the content coverage in EDS. The Base Index in EDS represents content from approximately 20,000 providers and includes partners from the world’s largest scholarly journal and book publishers. EDS draws upon EBSCO's extensive publisher relationships to feature a far more robust collection of rich metadata for most indexed content, ensuring that users can obtain the most relevant search results for their queries. Due to the extensive coverage, Hekman hopes that EDS will lead to increased usage of their resources and databases. “We are excited to see what impact EDS has on our user’s experience. We feel a lot more students will find what they need in just a few clicks.”
HAN University was also impressed with the technical support that EBSCO offered throughout the set up process – particularly the ease of setting up guest access for non-authorized users. Guest access allows unauthenticated users to access the data through EDS. Hekman says “EBSCO’s support team quickly arranged proxy setup for guest access. We were very pleased with how efficient they were and we are very happy with this feature.”
While many discovery services offer guest access, there are a select few components that are not available in other discovery services and require authentication to view in EDS. These components are a unique benefit to EDS customers. EDS is the only discovery service that displays PDF full text (when available) directly in the result list. When clicking on the full-text PDF icon, guest access users would be prompted to log in, and would remain authenticated for the remainder of their sessionmaking it an easier experience for the user. EDS offers a cleaner, simpler process for requesting authentication to access full text, with far fewer clicks than other discovery services.
Another important component is offered through platform blending, EDS allows information from important subject indexes that don’t otherwise participate in discovery services to be infused into the EDS result list. Because these full records can’t be made freely available on the web (much like full text), limited detail from these resources is displayed in a guest access record, and authentication is required to see the complete detail of the records. This option is not available through other discovery services as they do not include full records from these important subject index resources.
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-searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.
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 catalog, institutional repositories, EBSCOhost and other databases, and additional content sources to which it subscribes. It is this combination that allows a single, comprehensive, custom solution for discovering the value of any library’s collection.
About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the producer of EBSCOhost®, the world’s premier for-fee online research service, including full-text databases, subject indexes, point-of-care medical reference, historical digital archives, and e-books. The company provides more than 375 databases and hundreds of thousands of ebook titles to choose from. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals and magazines from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). EBSCO is also the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service™(EDS),which provides each institution with a fast, single search box for its entire collection, offering deeper indexing and more full-text searching of journals and magazines than any other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com. EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.
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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Director
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com
