Saturday, December 8, 2012

EBSCO Discovery a good tool to include in your library

Over period of time federated searching has been discussed and spoken about widely, however it has been observed that there are diverse opinions from the research and library community over the impact of federated search engine speed, quality, and relevance to search.

Serials Solutions, EBSCO, Ovid, Muses, TDNet and others entered into the market, however EBSCO was able to provide a reliable and fast searching algorithm for the research community through its product EBSCO Discovery Service.

Following features are outstanding according to me:

1.       Article translation service

2.       Guest Access

3.       Customization of interface

4.       API to help you integrate searching into your website

5.       Visual Search

6.       Create your collection (drag and drop)

7.       Image search

8.       Search screen alert

9.       Facets

10.   HTML Article (text to speech)

11.   High Quality relevance ranking

12.   Folder and folder management (Useful for researchers)

13.   Other standard features are all available

In the internet world user won’t wait for more than 8 seconds if they don’t get relevant results, under such situation, EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) is the right solutions because EBSCO has quality understanding about the indexing algorithm, relevant results are displayed very fast.

I feel institutes should consider EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) while evaluating federated searching (which is dying technology) for their institutional requirements.