Overview
Located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University (LSU) enrolls more than 29,000 students and employs 1,200 faculty members. The institution’s library collection contains four million titles, including more than 500,000 e-books, 352 databases — many available through the LOUIS consortium — and approximately 1,300 journal subscriptions with EBSCO.
In September 2015, the library migrated from EBSCO A-to-Z and LinkSource to Full Text Finder, EBSCO’s new holdings and link management tool. Full Text Finder includes a knowledge base, holdings management tools, a state-of-the-art publication search service, and a fully functional link resolver — all of which integrate with EBSCO Discovery Service™, the powerful single-search library platform that LSU implemented in 2012.
Holdings Management is a lot easier to maneuver [...] and the response time is significantly faster than A-to-Z.
Holdings Management is a lot easier to maneuver [...] and the response time is significantly faster than A-to-Z.
Streamlining Collection Management
After working with EBSCO’s A-to-Z product for more than 10 years, LSU’s Dana Taylor was apprehensive about migrating to Holdings and Link Management (HLM), the module within Full Text Finder that allows libraries to maintain their collections.
“When you know something well enough, you’re afraid of change,” the Head of Collection Management said. “But the migration to HLM has not been anything that I should have feared.” Taylor said her EBSCO Account Services Manager, Marsha Aucoin, walked her through the process several times. “It really was a smooth transition.”
Taylor said that Holdings Management, a tab in EBSCOadmin, is more user-friendly than A-to-Z’s administrative tool ever was. For example, the Overview page presents administrators with options to add holdings, create custom packages, upload holdings, and more.
“You can do all of those things from that first overview page, which is really nice compared to the previous A-to-Z product where you had to click on specific tabs to get to your starting point,” Taylor explained. “Holdings Management is a lot easier to maneuver. There’s not so much bouncing around and waiting for screens to pop up. Everything is done in the same place, and the response time is significantly faster than A-to-Z.”
In addition, Taylor said, Holdings Management gives her more control. She can make modifications to a single title or to a package as a whole. She can make custom coverage changes right in EBSCOadmin, whereas A-to-Z required her to access a different tool. Taylor also enabled the setting that allows EBSCO to automatically add titles to a package.
“The fact that EBSCO populates our holdings for titles, databases and packages purchased through them makes the acquisitions process seamless and is a huge benefit to me,” Taylor said. “It saves me time and effort.”
Preparing for the migration and understanding how to use HLM once it was in place was easy, Taylor said, thanks to helpful tutorials and a wealth of documentation on the EBSCO Support Site.
“I use the Support Site a lot and rely on the customer care emails to keep me apprised of the latest developments,” Taylor said. “We’re grateful for all of the valuable support and training that EBSCO offers to us.”