EBSCO Discovery Service

EBSCO Discovery Service is a discovery system for databases and library catalogs from the US database provider EBSCO Publishing .

Discovery Services

background

The use of modern search engine technology in the context of future library systems is currently one of the most discussed topics in the field of library information technology. On the one hand, search engine technology is increasingly being integrated into library research instruments such as library catalogs or OPACs, on the other hand, commercial providers have also discovered this market for themselves and are bringing various products onto the market with so-called Discovery Services, which open up large amounts of data of different origins with search engine technology in a search index can. With the help of these commercial search indices, which have been on the market since around 2009, libraries have the option of offering their users a standardized search entry point for their research. These services are intended to represent a " one-stop shop " that integrates all the advantages of a search engine.

definition

According to Jansen, Kemner-Heek and Schweitzer, a Discovery Service “includes all own and third-party data provided by a library in a comprehensive central search engine index and makes it available to users as a“ one-stop shop ”.” Baumann in turn limits this Define something as "no Discovery Service can provide a complete implementation of all of the data licensed by a library."

features

Oßwald summarizes the characteristics of Discovery Services as follows:

• Content: Index of the metadata and - if available - the content of the local or licensed resources
• Discovery: Google search box and advanced search
• Delivery: Speedy output, search engine ranking , faceting , drill-downs
• Flexibility: Largely independent of the functionality of the individual databases and their original preparation / search interface

Discovery Services currently offered

• Primo Central ( Ex Libris Group ), 2007: vers. 1; 2010: Vers. 3
• WorldCat Local ( OCLC ), 2007: Vers. 1
• Summon (Serial Solutions), 2009: Vers. 1
• EBSCO Discovery Services ( EBSCO ), 2010: Vers. 1; based on EBSCOhost

EBSCO Discovery Service

Product and Distribution

EBSCO is an experienced provider of the EBSCOhost database platform and can also fall back on many years of experience in the provision of web-based sources. The EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) has been on the market since 2010 and is also becoming increasingly popular in Europe. More than 100,000 institutions are EBSCO subscribers, so that the EDS product interface is very familiar to the approximately 5 million users.

costs

The costs are calculated depending on the number of users and the amount of additionally integrated content and today differ significantly from those mentioned in the article by Rowe (2010). According to Vaughan, the costs are calculated as follows: "The annual subscription pricing model relies primarily on the institution's full-time equivalent (FTE) count and level of service desired. Level of service can include factors such as the number and types of local library resources harvested and indexed (such as local digital collections and institutional repositories). Multiyear and consortial discounts are available. "

target group

Scientific libraries
The target group of the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) are primarily scientific libraries , as these offer the greatest access to controlled scientific texts and media. Accordingly, if you want to be and remain competitive, you should find and offer a search solution among their numerous resources. With the help of Discovery Services, libraries will be able to give their users simple or central access both to the local, analog and digital available as well as to the licensed and worldwide distributed electronic resources of interdisciplinary academic content.

User libraries in German-speaking countries
There are various users in German-speaking countries, e. B. the Saarland University Library , the Reutlingen , the University of Bochum library or university and public library Cologne .

Development history

EBSCO Publishing was founded in 1984 as a subsidiary of the US company EBSCO Industries, Inc. EBSCO Subscription Services and EBSCO Book Services together with EBSCO Publishing form the EBSCO Information Services Group. As a provider of numerous journals and bibliographic databases, EBSCO Publishing has a proprietary database and search engine technology with EBSCOhost. EBSCOhost forms the basis for the EBSCO Discovery Service.

Content

The EDS BASE INDEX contains full texts , abstracts and / or metadata from approx. 50,000 journals, 6 million monographs, 20,000 proceedings and 825,000 CDs and DVDs (as of September 2011). In addition to the databases offered by EBSCO, other free and / or commercial databases can be imported. OPAC and repositories can also be added if necessary. Every institution can offer its own individual EBSCO Discovery Service.

Range of functions

The Discovery Service is based on proprietary search engine technology from EBSCO. This search engine takes over the harvesting and normalization of the metadata to be indexed and thus builds an institution-specific overall index, which is intended to open up and make available to the user the information resources available as completely as possible. Depending on the available subscriptions of an institution, a user can receive bibliographical information or additional full texts as a result of his search.
Personalization options are also included: A personal user account offers options for adapting the appearance, default settings for the search and the display of results, as well as for further processing or exporting search results, for example to reference management programs or by e-mail; folders can also be created and alerts created .

Search / retrieval

The content can be searched in the EDS using either a simple or an advanced search. In addition, filter options, relevance ranking and faceting of search results are available.
The formal indexing of the contents of the base index enables the results to be specified more precisely in advance of the search, for example with regard to language, publication period or publication title. You can also restrict the content available as full text or in the library catalog.
A single search field is offered for entering search terms in the simple search. You can optionally specify a keyword, title or author. The advanced search offers up to 12 individual search fields, which are linked with one another using Boolean operators . Here the search takes place in the overall index or in one of the indices to be selected: full text, abstract, title, keyword, publication title or ISBN / ISSN .
Various search options can be made in both search modes. A special feature is the SmartTextSearching, which allows the entry of free text with a maximum length of 5000 characters. The entered text is standardized to the relevant search terms and the search is initially carried out in all abstracts contained. If no abstract is available, a search is made in the title index. The SmartText search is only available for EBSCO's own databases.

Presentation of results

EDS carries out a relevance ranking of the search results. Own stocks can be weighted higher in the ranking. The ranking is done by means of a ranking algorithm that sorts the search results in the most suitable way for the user. When evaluating the result, the existence and term frequency of a search term within the keywords, title keywords, keywords assigned by the author or in the abstract or full text of the document are taken into account.
When data records are included in the Discovery Service index, they are normalized according to formal and factual criteria. This enables faceted browsing through the search results or a restriction of the results both according to formal criteria such as publication type or title and according to content aspects such as keywords or geographical reference. As a special feature, there is the possibility of displaying the search results of the individual providers or producers according to the data source. The search results are enriched with numerous metadata such as abstracts, cover images, keywords of the authors or full texts.

System architecture

The EBSCO Discovery Service "harvests" metadata from internal (library) and external (database provider) sources and creates a single index from it. The resulting collection can be very large and of different structure, but since it is indexed overall and locally on the EBSCOhost servers , this enables a quick search response. The EBSCO Discovery Service also offers customization options with regard to the collection of metadata and the front-end delivery of search results.

The EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) offers access to metadata of a collection and the EBSCOhost databases, which can be subscribed individually.

There are also other different services that can also be purchased individually, such as B. Link Resolver and the EBSCOhost Integration Toolkit (EIT). This includes several services:

• Persistent links : Users can integrate permanent links to full texts of the EBSCO databases in a library portal. This enables a direct connection to the full text without having to register or change the portal. The links can be set up independently by the administrator.

• RSS feeds: Feeds can be set up by the user for certain content in the databases. At first only one address is transmitted in order to save resources, if necessary the entire text is then delivered.

• Web Service ( XML ) - Gateway : It is used to create direct links to a reference database. This service offers a wide range of integration options in order to send and receive specially adapted search queries and results. It contains:

• Authentication: Identification takes place via the IP address . Controlled access to other computers is also possible with a user ID and password.

• Keyword, keyword, image, index and thesaurus search

• Items Search

• Support of many vocabularies that are widely used in industry such as MeSH , CINAHL, ICD9 , ICD10 and SNOMED-CT

• Z39.50 support

• SOAP and REST access for EBSCOhost; A specialized API has been available for EBSCO Discovery Service since 2012

• secure (SSL) access

• Generation of all kinds of statistics

• Real-time updates.

Interfaces

A programming interface ( English Application Interface (API) ) enables communication between different program parts or programs.
The API defines the connection of an application program to another application program at the source code level . An API is divided into the following classes: function-oriented, file-oriented, object-oriented and protocol-oriented. The protocol-oriented API enables communication between applications that run on technically different hardware or different operating systems . Common communication protocols used by protocol-oriented APIs include: B. SOAP, HTTP or JSON .

Discovery API
Since 2012, EBSCO has offered an API tailored to the Discovery Service. This API has the following methods:

• Authentication: Creates an authentication token for user name and password access to the API, IP access is recommended and this step is omitted here
• Create Session: Creates a user session and defines whether the user accesses the data as a guest or as a user with full access rights
• Info: Returns the EBSCO Discovery Service Limiter, sorting options, search abbreviations, expanders (expand the search) & limiters for a specific profile
• Search: Performs a search and sends a response in JSON or XML format
• Retrieve: Retrieves the complete EBSCO Discovery Service data set, including a direct link to the PDF full text and source code of the HTML full text (if available)
• End Session: Ends the API session created under Create Session

Discovery API protocols
The Discovery API can be reached using the following protocols :

• REST: An HTTP protocol that uses simple URLs to request data from the EIT Web Service API.

The REST protocol sends data back in XML or JSON format from the EBSCO Discovery Service. The response contains all URLs (custom links) that lead to the full text on the web, the response of the retrieve response continues to pass direct links to those hosted on EBSCOhost.

See also

• Primo Central
• Summon
• WorldCat Local
• Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE), a data provider for EDS

Bibliography

• Katja Bartlakowski: Make the library really look more like google: On the introduction of the discovery system “scinos” at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences , in: Bibliotheksdienst 49: 6 (2015), 643–648.
• Anina Baumann: Strengths and weaknesses of Discovery Services using the example of the EBSCO Discovery Service (PDF; 1.0 MB), Bachelor thesis, FHO in Information Science (Churer Writings on Information Science, Paper 49), Chur November 2011
• Marshall Breeding: The State of the Art in Library Discovery 2010 , in: Computers in Libraries, 30/1, January / February 2010, pp. 31–34
• Karen Calhoun: The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools (PDF; 179 kB), Prepared for the Library of Congress, Final Report, March 17, 2006
• EBSCO Publishing: EBSCO Discovery Service (Flyer). The most extensive discovery solution that can be configured according to customer needs ... (accessed on October 3, 2011; PDF; 245 kB)
• Heiko Jansen, Kristin Kemner-Heek, Roswitha Schweitzer: Competitive analysis of selected commercial search indices (PDF; 2.2 MB), project as part of the extra- occupational master’s course "Master in Library and Information Science (MALIS)" at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences, hbz / VZG 2010 (accessed October 2, 2011)
• George Machovec: A Comparative Overview of Journal Discovery Systems , Charleston Preconference, Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, November 3, 2010, Powerpoint presentation (accessed October 8, 2011)
• Karl Wilhelm Neubauer: The future has already begun. Do new service products lead to new strategies for libraries? In: BIT online 13 (2010) No. 1, pp. 13-20
• Karl Wilhelm Neubauer: The Future of the Local Library System. In: BIT online 13 (2010) No. 2, pp. 120–128
• Ronda Rowe: Web-Scale Discovery: A Review of Summon, EBSCO Discovery Service, and World Cat, in: The Charleston advisor, Vol. 12, H. 1, 2010, pp. 5-10
• Jason Vaughan: Ebsco Discovery Services, in: Library Technology Reports, January 2011, Chapter 4, pp. 30–39, Abstract (accessed October 2, 2011)
• Jason Vaughan: Investigations into library web-scale discovery services , Information Technology and Libraries (Preprint), University of Nevada, Las Vegas 2011 (accessed November 3, 2015)
• Jason Vaughan Discusses Web Scale Discovery Systems Submitted by Daniel A. Freeman on February 4, 2011 on ALATechSource (accessed October 3, 2011)
• Sarah C. Williams, Anita K. Foster: Promise Fulfilled? An EBSCO Discovery Service Usability Study, in: Journal of web librarianship, Vol. 5, H. 5, 2011, pp. 179-198
• Jeff Wisniewski: Scale Discovery: The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades , in: Online, Vol. 34, No. 4, July / August 2010, pp. 55-57

Web links

• EBSCO
• EBSCOhost

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Marshall Breeding: The State of the Art in Library Discovery 2010 , in: Computers in Libraries, 30 (1), January / February 2010, p. 31 (accessed November 29, 2011)
2. ↑ Heiko Jansen, Kristin Kemner-Heek, Roswitha Schweitzer: Competitive analysis of selected commercial search indices (PDF; 2.2 MB), project within the framework of the part-time master’s course "Master in Library and Information Science (MALIS)" at Cologne University of Applied Sciences, hbz / VZG 2010, p. 6 (accessed on October 2, 2011)
3. ↑ Anina Baumann: Strengths and weaknesses of Discovery Services using the example of the EBSCO Discovery Service (PDF; 1.0 MB), Bachelor thesis, FHO in Information Science (Churer Writings on Information Science, Paper 49), Chur November 2011, p. 18 ( accessed on November 29, 2011)
4. ↑ See Achim Oßwald: Discovery Services and future library systems, script for module 1.6. "Information technology", MaLIS course at Cologne University of Applied Sciences, summer semester 2011, slide 6
5. ↑ See EBSCOhost: E-Journals Database (accessed on November 29, 2011)
6. ↑ See EBSCOhost: EBSCO Discovery Service. EDS Platform Features ( Memento of the original from December 29, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed November 29, 2011)  
7. ↑ Cf. Ronda Rowe: Web-Scale Discovery: A Review of Summon, EBSCO Discovery Service, and WorldCat Local, in: The Charleston advisor, Vol. 12, H. 1, 2010, p. 5
8. ↑ Jason Vaughan: Ebsco Discovery Services, in: Library Technology Reports, January 2011, Chapter 4, pp 30-39, p 31
9. ↑ See Baumann: EBSCO (PDF; 1.0 MB), p. 3 (accessed on November 29, 2011)
10. ↑ See EBSCO Industries, Inc .: The History of EBSCO Industries, Inc. ( Memento of the original from September 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on December 4, 2011)  
11. ↑ See Paula Hane: EBSCO Celebrates Its 60th Anniversary , in: Information Today, Vol. 21 No 4, April 2004 (accessed December 4, 2011)
12. ↑ See EBSCOhost: EBSCO Discovery Service ( Memento of the original from November 26, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed November 29, 2011)  
13. ↑ See Jansen et al. a .: Competitor analysis (PDF; 2.2 MB), p. 10f. (accessed on October 2, 2011)
14. ↑ See ibid. (PDF; 2.2 MB) p. 11 (accessed October 2, 2011)
15. ↑ See Baumann: EBSCO (PDF; 1.0 MB), p. 28 (accessed on November 29, 2011)
16. ↑ See Jansen et al. a .: Competitor analysis (PDF; 2.2 MB), p. 13 (accessed on October 2, 2011)
17. ↑ See ibid. (PDF; 2.2 MB), p. 11 (accessed October 2, 2011)
18. ↑ See EBSCOhost: How does the EBSCOhost search engine determine relevancy ranking? (accessed on December 4, 2011)
19. ↑ See Baumann: EBSCO (PDF; 1.0 MB), p. 28 (accessed on November 29, 2011)
20. ↑ See EBSCOhost: About EDS ( Memento of the original from December 17, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed on December 4, 2011)  
21. ↑ See EBSCOhost: Integration Toolkit (accessed on November 3, 2015)
22. ↑ See EBSCOhost: Frequently Asked Z39.50 Questions (accessed December 4, 2011)
23. ↑ EBSCO Discovery API information page (accessed June 11, 2013)
24. ↑ New EBSCO Discovery API ( Memento of the original from May 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed June 11, 2013.  
25. ↑ EDS API Documentation - Accessible only to registered users (accessed on June 11, 2013)