Intro toEBSCO Discovery Service

(EDS)LIB 107 Tutorial - Spring, 2015

Dr. Scott LeeInformation Competency Librarian

Antelope Valley College

What is EDS?

• EDS connects all of the Library’s electronic resources into one interface.

• EDS allows you to search for books, eBooks, articles, videos and more at the same time.

Notes on Using This PowerPoint

• I recommend that you look through this entire presentation and then practice using EDS with it as a guide.

• Reading Chapter 3 of your textbook will help with using EDS and understanding some of the language in this presentation.

• EDS is always adding new content, so your numbers may not exactly match the examples here.

Where is EDS?

• EDS can be found on the Library’s homepage, which is at this address:– www.avc.edu/studentservices/library/

Library Homepage w/EDS Search Box

The EDS Search Box

There are Three Tabs• All Resources

– Allows you to search for any and all resources available in EDS. This tab includes what is searched in the other two.

• Articles– Only searches for journal or

magazine articles.

• Library Catalog– This tab only searches the AVC

Library’s catalog for books and eBooks.

The EDS Search BoxBelow the Search Box

• Full-Text– This limits your search to only

full-text articles and resources. Some resources only have citations and abstracts, and this will remove those from your search results.

• Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals– This limits your search to the

highest quality research materials which are scholarly journals. Some instructors require you to only use scholarly journals.

You can search the Title Field, the Author Field or conduct a Keyword search, which would allow you to search all fields at once. See Chapter 3 in your textbook for more information on field searching.

Conducting a Search• For this example, I will do a Keyword search in the All Resources

tab for information on information literacy. I will limit my search to Full Text & Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals.

• After clicking the Search Button, I will be shown a screen with my results.

When you are accessing EDS from off of the AVC campus, you will see the screen below after you click the Search button. I have provided the User ID and Password in Blackboard in the Lecture Notes for this week.

If you’re on the AVC campus, you will not see this screen and will be taken directly to the EDS Results Screen, which is on the next slide.

The Results Screen

The Results Screen

• The Results Screen shows how many and what types of resources have been found from your search.

• The Results Screen is separated into two columns: The Search Results Column is on the right and the Refine Results Column is on the left.

For each located resource, EDS provides a citation (Title, Author, Date, Subject Terms) and a link to the full-text. These two articles from my results have PDF files for their full-text. PDF files are for articles that appear in an electronic version exactly as they would in their paper versions. eBooks usually also use PDF files.

The icons left of the citations identify what type of format the resources are (academic journal, book, eBook, video, etc.)

The Results Column

Clicking on the title of an article takes you to the full citation and an abstract. An abstract is a brief description of what is in the article.

Whenever you are in the full citation for any resource, you can get back to your list of search results by clicking Result List.

The Refine Results Column

The Refine Results Column

• As previously stated, the Refine Results Column allows you to control your results through the use of limiters.

• Limiters are options you use you reduce the number of resources you find. With limiters, you get results that are better suited to your needs.

• I will only show you some of the available limiters. Please explore the others on your own.

Limit By Year

• You can limit your results to a specific range of years.

• You can either move the slider bars or enter new years in the boxes.

• By default, EDS selects all years for which resources are available. Yes, there are resources from 1897 on information literacy.

Limit By Year

• On the next slide, you will see that I have chosen to limit my search from 2005 to 2015. This reduced my number of results from around 456 thousand to around 312 thousand.

• As this is not a significant drop, it shows that most of the research on information literacy (about 70%) occurred in the last decade.

Date Limiter & Breadbox

Notice the box above the date limiter labeled Current Search. This is called the Breadbox. It shows which limiters you have in place. You can remove a limiter at any time by clicking the small blue/green box with the white x next to that limiter.

Note: The section above the Limiters section of the Current Search box is called Expanders. It allows you to search within the text of articles and eBooks for your search terms. This is set by default and it is recommended that you never remove it.

Date Limiter & Breadbox

• Right, you can see that I removed the Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals limiter and the Full Text.

• Above, you can see it dramatically increased my results to about 1.1 million.

• You can always re-add and/or remove a limiter when you wish.

Resource Types Limiter

• Below the Date Limiter is the Resource Types Limiter.

• You can choose to limit yourself to specific types of information resources.

• Click Show More to get an expanded list of options, as shown on the next slide.

The numbers in parentheses show how many results of that type of resource were found.

Below, I chose to limit my Resource Types to eBooks, and Videos. You can use the scroll bar on the right to see all of your options.

The next slide shows it reduced my results to 62 thousand.

Resource Types Limiter - Results

The first three resources found are an two eBooks and an online video. Both can be accessed through EDS by clicking the View/Download – Online Access links. For the eBook, it is available in EDS, while the video is accessible from another website, which the link takes you to.

The link for the video would take you here.

Clicking on the video link, I have opened a second browser tab. To get back to EDS, I can click the tab labeled Result List: Information Literacy.

To continue demonstrating the use of limiters, I have removed the eBooks, and Videos limiters. I have also re-applied the Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals and Full Text limiters. (The Clear All link at the bottom of the left image would remove all limiters at once, but it would also remove the Expander, so it is not recommended you use it.)

Before the Change After the Change

Subject Limiter

• The last limiter we will look at is the Subject Limiter.

• To use it, click the arrow next to the words Limit by Subject (like the top image) and it will expand into a menu (like the bottom image).

• Then click Show More and the screen on the next slide will appear.

• Each resource in EDS has a list of subject terms that are related to it (you saw an example back on slide 16). EDS takes all of the subject terms that appear in the thousands of resources and ranks them according to how many times they appear.

• Above are the most popular subject terms for my search. I can use this as a guide to discover which concepts most apply to my search and find more relevant information. I can also use it to narrow my search to more specific topics.

Looking at my options, I have decided to focus on resources related to teaching, higher education and academic achievement within the broader concept of information literacy. Therefore, I selected the subject terms above.

Subject Limiter

Using those Subject Terms in this limiter lowered my results count to just over 16 thousand.

Also, the subject terms I selected show in my Breadbox. Again, you can remove any or all of subject terms when you wish, just like any other limiter.

As you can see, EDS is a powerful research and information discovery tool. Mastering it will allow you to navigate a deep collection of information resources and find what will best serve your academic needs. Like any skill, it requires training and experience to do it properly. Use of EDS will be part of Exam #2, so you need to be comfortable using it to be successful on that exam. It will also be necessary for Project #3.

Intro toEBSCO Discovery Service

(EDS)

LIB 107 TutorialSpring, 2015