Library Services | News

SUNY Adds Discovery Service for All State Higher Ed Institutions

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 10/06/14

SUNYConnect, the library system for New York's public higher education institutions, has deployed a new discovery service in an effort to provide more accurate search results.

SUNYConnect chose to implement EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) and 51 of the 60 SUNYConnect institutions have adopted the service.

"Superior relevancy ranking was a factor in the committee's selection of EDS," said John Schumacher, electronic resources coordinator at SUNYConnect, in a prepared statement. "EBSCO's focus on search terms' occurrence within subject indexing is seen as a positive and productive portion of an overall fine relevancy ranking algorithm."

Schumacher said he also hopes EDS will help to maximize the usefulness of the system's collection.

"SUNY is pleased to have moved relatively quickly into the area of discovery services," added Schuumacher. "Tools that are quickly becoming common place across academic libraries. There is a hope that if EDS can become the major discovery tool for SUNY libraries that this will also have a result of increased productivity/streamlined processes as far as the enabling of electronic resource discovery (ebook sets, video, etc.). In as large a library system as SUNYConnect, those factors can be significant. Open SUNY (our enlarged and enhanced online education initiative) will be interested in going further in terms of using the Curriculum Builder feature as well."

A learning management system (LMS) plugin, Curriculum Builder allows users to build and manage course reading lists within an LMS.

"SUNYConnect is an entity of the State University of New York (SUNY) and the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges and community colleges in the United States," according to information released by the organization. More information is available at sunyconnect.suny.edu.

Visit ebscohost.com to learn more about EDS.