TCA Letters to the Editor
Press Release
Title: EBSCO Responds to Jane Burke Interview
Date: July 2010
Organization: EBSCO Publishing
Letter:
In the April 2010 edition of The Charleston Advisor, Jane Burke, Senior Vice President of Serials Solutions discusses discovery. EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) was mentioned in several instances and in light of the many inaccurate assumptions related to EDS, there are a number of issues we would like to address to be sure that the facts are clarified.
Burke states that EDS is "repurposing existing products". To the contrary, EBSCO Discovery Service is a unique offering that brings together an enormous unified index including a base collection of data from multiple sources and partners. The index includes content from databases that have become industry standards, a formidable e-journal collection (which leverages EBSCO's vast relationships with publishers), the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents File (ETOC), numerous eBooks, and many other sources. The unified index is comprised of metadata from hundreds of thousands of sources from more than 20,000 providers. The EDS base index is the foundation on which a library can add its library catalog, special collections, EBSCOhost databases and other resources to create a comprehensive customized collection to enable inclusive discovery of the library's collection. Although EBSCO Discovery Service leverages the power and familiarity of the EBSCOhost infrastructure, EDS is a new and unique solution for discovery of library collections--searchable from a single entry point.
EBSCOhost has been built and developed based on numerous usability studies and years of gathering user feedback, and stands as a leading platform for premium research. Given EBSCOhost is one of the most used research platforms in many libraries, it is natural for users to use EDS, with its familiar look and feel, to discover all of a library's print and electronic collections --without requiring additional training for either librarians or the end user. What's more is that it is a true "experience" in that users can not only search a library's entire collection with EDS, but they can remain within the platform beyond just a result set. It's a full-featured system. In other words, not only is the index unified, but the detailed records are as well--and the functionality is inherent in the search experience for the user to make the most of the content it discovers. In other services, once the user has a set of results, they then link off to another platform or service to fulfill their information need. EDS, however, provides consistent detailed records for millions of articles, including inherent full text within the same user experience in many cases.
EBSCO Discovery Service is mischaracterized in the interview by the claim that EDS and other competing products "continue to rely on federated search." For sake of clarity, a base-line definition of a discovery service is a collection of locally-indexed metadata available from a single search. EDS is exactly this, and does not rely on federation. Perhaps confusion exists as EBSCO also offers a federated search solution (EBSCOhost Integrated Search) that can be nearly seamlessly integrated for customers who choose to add federation to their overall solution. It is correct that not every resource is available or applicable to include within a discovery service. If federation is interwoven into the user experience, and has sophisticated technology in place to eliminate the frustrations of slow connectors, as EBSCOhost Integrated Search does, we feel there is significant value in federating these otherwise unavailable library resources to create the most complete one-stop, single search of a library's collection.
Burke states, "as far as EBSCO is concerned...we have more than 95 percent of the Academic Search Premier journals in Summon." While we appreciate ProQuest's Serials Solutions holding up one of our resources as the industry standard for content, it is worthwhile to point out that EBSCO Discovery Service includes 100 percent of not only Academic Search Premier but it larger version Academic Search Complete. Also in EBSCO Discovery Service, not only is the indexing 100 percent complete, it is also far more detailed than thin table of contents metadata. In EBSCO Discovery Service, in addition to including much more detail--author-supplied abstracts, author-supplied keywords, author affiliations and author email addresses--the ability to search the full text of an article enables far more consequential results. It is the depth and breadth of the metadata that creates a strong discovery service.
Perhaps most critically, Burke implies that Summon is unique vs. EBSCO as it does not favor its own content (ProQuest content in the case of Summon). This is not accurate. Our goal is to provide the most comprehensive, customized searching of a library's resources in order to bring back the best, most relevant results to the end user--regardless of the source/provider behind a given result. EBSCO Discovery Service applies a relevancy ranking to its results and does so in an unbiased fashion. In fact, EBSCO has gone as far as to provide publicly available detail on its relevancy ranking methodology, (http://support.ebsco.com/knowledge_base/detail.php?topic=&id=3971&page=1).
Tim Collins
President, EBSCO Publishing
