[Web4lib] EBSCOhost Connection

[Bruce Brigell]

About a year ago EBSCO refused to allow us to display their content in a federated search unless the user was pre-authenticated. We had a setup where results [citation & abstracts] would appear and users would only have to login when selecting items from subscription Db's. 

If this product allows such viewing I will be asking for their reconsideration on this issue. 

It's been a sore point to me that we must ask our users to authenticate before accessing a product that is supposed to compete with search engines on the ease of use issue. My thought is that if they see the results from our databases first they will be more likely to take the time to authenticate.

Bruce Brigell
Coordinator of Information Services
Skokie Public Library
bbrigell at skokielibrary.info


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org on behalf of Stacy Pober
Sent: Tue 8/29/2006 6:11 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org; EZProxy discussion list digest
Subject: [Web4lib] EBSCOhost Connection
 
Recently, I received an email from one of our consortial contacts that
provided a link to info about  "EBSCOhost Connection from EBSCO"
<http://support.ebsco.com/knowledge_base/detail.php?id=2716&t=h>

If I understand this new service - and I'm not sure I do - search engine users
will be able to get EBSCOhost citations in their results, and will be shown
a link of "Connect to Your Library".

[skipping some steps]

Then, if our library has opted into this service, our users
can get access to the article, if it's in one of our EBSCO databases.

Since we often see students searching with Google when they would be better
served by looking in article databases, this sounds like it might be useful.
However, the authentication appears to be a login/password via EBSCO, and
our authentication method is IP filtering, with EZproxy used for off-campus
authentication.

EBSCO offers libraries the option of redirecting the user a URL such as
our database list, but then they would have to search for the article

When I called EBSCOhost support to ask for details, the support
people had not yet heard of this service.  This was surprising, as their
database tech support tends to be right on top of things.

I'm still a little fuzzy on the limits of this service.

If users are able to search Google and have the content in our library's
EBSCO databases included in that search that sounds like a fine
thing.  Users would like having an additional way to search the databases,
and we might see overall increased use of our resources, as well as
happier users.

OTOH, if *all* EBSCOhost content is now searchable via the web search
engines, this would include many databases we do not get.  That might lead
to increased user dissatisfaction.

Has anyone used this service?  Do you like it? If you're using EZproxy, how
have you handled the user authentication?

--
Stacy Pober
Information Alchemist
Manhattan College
O'Malley Library
Riverdale, NY 10471
stacy.pober at manhattan.edu

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