Mississippi State University Libraries’ EBSCO Discovery Service Experience

Where we started…. SirsiDynix online catalog ContentDM digital collection Federated search engine – Buried on website – Not adopted or promoted by librarians – Different interface – Slow response time

Started exploring discovery tools in 2009 – Evaluated EBSCO Discovery, Summon, Worldcat Local – Beta test site Spring 2010 – Tested in-house and with some faculty and students

Reason for selecting EDS: – Familiar interface – Proven track record working with EBSCO – Relevance ranking – Price

Implementation includes: Majority of our indexes Online catalog (consortium environment) ContentDM digital collections

Implementation process: EBSCO handled setting up all indexes Worked with EBSCO to load our online catalog data – Extract records from SirsiDynix monthly and FTP to EBSCO – Use Real Time Availability for item status information Worked with EBSCO to load ContentDM metadata – Harvesting records using OAI

Ongoing Administration: Work with EBSCO to add indexes Use EBSCOAdmin for the customization of the interface (colors, logos, widgets, facets) Usage statistics using EBSCOAdmin

Roll out - August 2010 Made decision to make it more prominent on our website Use EDS as the default search on the front page Integrate search boxes in LibGuides

Comments from faculty and students: Promoting/teaching through Library Instruction and Reference Librarians embracing it more than federated searching Positive comments from faculty and students when in “discovery’ mode – “Makes the library more relevant” – faculty member – Conducted faculty initiated search – found results previously missed Some frustration from undergraduates when looking for specific item (known item searching)