This was sent in an email to Larry from Babak on Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Questions about EDS
from USMAI
Feb 1, 2012
Would each institution have their own instance
of EDS running with their own specific catalog
records, databases they have access to, etc., as
if each institution subscribed to EDS on their
own? As well as layout, delimiters, facets, etc.
customized to each institution?
YES. Each institution will have their own instance
of EDS. They can customize it so it shows catalog
results just from their own site or the whole system.
Each institution will have the ability to include the
unique resources they subscribe to in addition to
those that are purchased via USMAI. In addition,
each institution can apply it’s own branding and
make decisions about how facets, limiters, and other
widgets may appear. All of the institution’s settings
(content, catalog(s), branding, links) can be
maintained down to the profile level within a single
Administration account or certainly individually if
there are multiple Administration accounts.
1.
2. Does EDS return search results for users at each
institution, based on each campus’ individual set
of databases? If the list returned as the result of
a search at Institution X includes items that
Institution Y has access to (but not Institution X),
would the user at Institution X hit a dead-end
trying to access such items? Or is there an
alternative of automatically opening an
interlibrary loan form, for example?
EDS will return results customized to the
institution. If an institution wishes to expand search
to include resources that they do not subscribe to
and are available as part of the Discovery index,
they are able to do so and then present link to ILL
form to request items they do not own or subscribe
to. Each individual search will be executed against
the content established by the institution itself –
reference question above.
Within the
Administration interface, you have the ability to
customize the content set, branding, links etc on an
individual profile level.
3.
Assuming every institution's catalog records go
into the central index, does EBSCO need formal
permission from every campus to access and
integrate the catalog records? Can there be
different relevancy ranking with respect to
catalog hits in each institution so that those with
holdings of the specific institution in question
would float to the top? How would real-time
availability, local notes, etc. display be handled
in a one record for all institutions environment
in the central index?
Each catalog is available to the institutions that the customer
wishes to make it available do (consortia member institutions in
this case). The Relevancy Ranking can boost each institutions
own content, their catalog, to ensure that these results are
presented higher in the result list.
4.
Would EDS be able to integrate content that is
local to one institution (e.g. LibGuides), so it can
be discoverable along with other materials? If
so, would the local content of Institution X be
discoverable only by Institution X's users or by
users from all institutions?
Sites can add local content to their EDS profile. In the example
of Lib Guides, they can be added in the right column as a
widget. Local content could be exported to other USMAI
members profiles if requested and approved by library the
content belongs to.
5. How does EDS work with SFX? Does it recognize it
for the full-text delimiter?
EDS works well with SFX. The full text limiter will not pull all
items known to be part of the libraries holdings via SFX, only
smartlinking and custom links such as JSTOR, Science Direct and
other resources available in the base index.
6. How does the Facets function work? Does it query
the full set of records retrieved in the search, or
only a subset of these?
The facets are built from the meta data returned of the result set.