Nichols School, a Buffalo, New York school for grades 5-12, is one of the first schools in the country to implement EBSCO Discovery Service. Librarians weren’t looking for a discovery service but a demo of EBSCO’s EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS) won the library staff over with the ease of searching and breadth of information available in EDS.
Although librarians Nichols School were not initially considering a library discovery service, Director of Libraries & Academic Technology, Susan Allen, saw EDS tying in with the library’s goals to prepare students for further education and to develop the professional skills they will need. “I am always looking for ways to model what our students will encounter in higher education. I am also trying to teach them the information literacy skills they need to be a solid, informed digital citizen.” Since implementation Allen says EDS has really had a positive impact on the library. “It is really nice for there to be an animated buzz about the library on campus.”
EDS provides users with access to a school’s entire collection via a single, customizable entry point. This easy-to-use search experience really impressed Allen. “I was floored by the ease of searching and the breadth of information that was available. I manage the resources but I was flabbergasted by the resources that are available. They were always available but not in a format that was as useful as they are now.” In the future, Allen hopes EDS will minimize their students’ use of Google and since the EDS implementation she has seen “fewer general web searches than in the past.”
The school integrated EDS into their existing library collection by taking advantage of some of the EDS customization features and transformed the search page to match the school colors and the heading of its web pages. Students have really responded well to the new service and Allen says usage in library sources has doubled since implementation.
Allen is also sees EDS as a valuable tool in faculty development “I have an online professional development course planned for our faculty this summer to refresh them in what constitutes research in the 21st century and how best to assign and assess research to meet the resources and methodologies available. EDS plays a prominent role in this class.”
EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box-searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.
