2025 EBSCO User Group

In partnership with GOBI, the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC) launched an ambitious collaborative collection development project in 2021. Informed by the findings of three prior projects, this pilot sought to explore practical ways in which the thirteen members of the Confederation could engage in prospective collection development in support of a vision to treat the sum of our local collections as one great collection. This presentation will explain how the project was scoped and managed and will provide a summary of the outcomes of a two-year pilot purchasing frontlist print Brill monographs through GOBI. Attendees will journey with IPLC through zones of ambiguity and discover differences between coordinated and collaborative approaches to collection development. The presenters will share IPLC’s concept of strategic duplication; metrics for identifying the number of copies needed for local use, preservation, and lending; our process for consensus building and decision-making; and governance models for collaborative collection projects and programs. We will also share our ideas on evolving the project to include ebooks by leveraging GOBI solutions and expertise.

The integration of diverse perspectives into research materials allows for a more holistic and enriched educational experience and fosters an environment that promotes equitable access to information. A commitment to inclusivity empowers students, researchers, and faculty to engage with content that resonates with their unique backgrounds.

Hear from Rice Majors, Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources at the University of California, Davis, and Kimberly Clarkson, Senior Product Manager at EBSCO. They will discuss the importance of inclusivity in academic resources and how those inclusive resources are created.

In this session, attendees will:
• See the importance of diverse and inclusive content with a case study from UC Davis
• Learn how LGBTQ+ Source was created and enhanced based on librarian and user feedback

EDS is incredibly powerful, but can sometimes feel overwhelming to students and other patrons. In this presentation Simon Ringsmuth, a Digital Services Librarian at Oklahoma State University, will demonstrate the process he has used to create a series of short, targeted, effective, and engaging videos to help patrons learn various aspects of EDS including basics such as keyword searching to advanced features like custom folder sharing and boolean operators. This collaborative video-creation process utilizes free tools for ideation and scripting, as well as off-the-shelf software like Final Cut Pro and Camtasia to handle editing and screen-captures. This process is also not limited to EDS: Librarians can use this process to create tutorial videos about all manner of software tools to help patrons learn to use them more effectively. While some technical knowledge is useful, it is not required and anyone can learn to use this process to create engaging, effective tutorial videos. To see the videos that this presentation is based on, visit bit.ly/OSU-EDS-Search-Videos.

While peer-reviewed journals get the spotlight, magazine archives play an essential role in academic research. They not only provide coverage of events, trends and cultural happenings, they also provide first-hand, eye-witness accounts of history.

Hear from Sarah Mueth, Serials & Electronic Resources Librarian from the University of North Carolina and Courtney Peckham, Senior Product Manager at EBSCO about how magazine archive collections are curated for libraries and how they are used by academic researchers in different disciplines.

In this session, attendees will:
• Understand the value of magazine archives in historical research
• Hear use cases for incorporating magazine archives into research with multiple applications
• Learn best practices for curating your own magazine archives collection

Effective academic research and course design today requires resources selected from a broad swathe of the world's literary wealth. Research databases, full-text archives, and publishing programs offer the greatest value to scholars when they include a body of works and authors from cultures and regions around the globe. Coverage is not the only consideration when reaching beyond what has traditionally been called the western canon, however. So, too, does curation come into play: why include a given text or author, and what relevant issues can they help students and researchers grapple with today?

Hear from Angela Gibson, Senior Director of Operational Strategy at MLA and head of MLA’s publishing program, and Kimberly Clarkson, Senior Product Manager at EBSCO. They will discuss the importance of reaching beyond the Western canon for literature studies.



In this session, attendees will:

Understand how literature resources balance coverage and curation
Learn the values underlying the MLA’s publishing program, including the MLA International Bibliography’s approach to curation, and its focus on world languages and literatures.
Learn how LitBase was built around the idea of celebrating diverse authors and works

Learn how MARC records are transformed into Linked Data -- and back into MARC -- using the new Linked Data Editor module in the Sunflower release of FOLIO.  
 This session is directed to technical librarians and systems administrators, and will 

• recap key points from the Linked Data 101 session, from the 2024 EBSCO User Group meeting 
• walk through the basics of linked data as a technology 
• explain how MARC records are transformed into linked data (and transformed back into MARC), and 
• outline the advantages and challenges of deploying linked data for metadata management. 

Despite steady enrollment, declining funding and inflationary pressure forced reductions to journals supporting Millersville University’s Nursing Program. Utilizing the CINAHL database on EBSCOhost as the user point of entry, a CustomLink was created to facilitate real-time user access to articles from specific non-renewed journals directly from article records during user search. Articles from lower use, now not available, journal titles are available for fee via the Article Galaxy Scholar (AGS) service in real-time. Utilizing user attributes conveyed to OpenAthens (OA), those attributes are transformed in OA and mapped for use by AGS to provide library scoped purchase opportunities by specific user, journal title, number of requests from the journal title, or article year of publication, to facilitate real-time access via Article Galaxy Scholar. Non-Nursing program users not eligible for this service are seamlessly re-routed and provided access to more traditional requesting mechanisms should they attempt to make use of the document delivery service intended for Nursing program students and faculty. This approach can be applied to other user / program combinations as curricular need or budget warrant and could influence resource renewals.

Many libraries have just moved to the new EBSCO EDS interface, and some are still transitioning. This session will be a tour of the new EDS interface, including what's new, what has changed, and the reasons behind the update. This will also be a chance to ask questions.

In this session, learn how linked data connects information across interrelated library resources so they can be easily discovered in your collection. Linked data uses ontologies, which are essentially the linked data schema for how information is related to each other, to create these networks. Attendees will understand how EBSCO applies knowledge graph analytics through use cases. They will also understand how to leverage their own linked data to identify duplicate resources, if an author’s affiliation