The MU Libraries are reviewing discovery tools as our subscription to Summon comes up for renewal, and we are considering the other commercial discovery tools available.
A discovery tool provides a single search box for ease of searching many library resources at one time. It includes citations for books, e-books, scholarly journals, magazines, dissertations, DVDs and many more resources, with links to full-text for the materials for which we have access.
EbscoHost has provided free trial access to EDS, their discovery tool. This trial gives the libraries and our users an opportunity to test the tool and assess whether it would be a good tool to add to our collection.
Since this is a free trial, it has not been fully customized, as it would be if we were to subscribe. It does not contain all records from our catalog of books, but instead only has a subset so that we can see how book records are integrated with the other records in the results. We have also not activated all of our subscriptions to display within it.
To conduct a comprehensive search, we recommend using the Summon Search & Find and the individual subject databases we provide. However, for other searches the EbscoHost EDS will be sufficient to identify materials.
Please test it out and give us your feedback. We would like to know what you think about the tool – if you found it easy to use, which features you like/did not like, etc. Your feedback will help us as we consider the future of a discovery tool for the MU Libraries.
If you have any questions, please contact Rhonda Whithaus (whithausr@missouri.edu).