2025 EBSCO User Group

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) play a vital role in educating and empowering Black and ethnic students and fostering a diverse and inclusive learning environment. To ensure their continued success, HBCU libraries must select collections that reflect the diverse experiences and knowledge of the HBCU communities. However, ensuring library collections reflect this commitment to DEI requires ongoing assessment and strategic development. This proposal outlines a plan to leverage EBSCO subscriptions and resources to enhance the library’s collection in support of DEI initiatives at Tennessee State University. While TSU library possesses a robust collection, there may be gaps in representing diverse voices and perspectives. By strategically leveraging EBSCO resources, the TSU library can significantly enhance its collection to better reflect the institution’s commitment to DEI. This will empower students and faculty with the informational resources they need to excel academically and become well-informed global citizens.

During this session, attendees will learn about responsible AI practices from four perspectives – librarian, researcher, publisher, and platform vendor – and their impact on psychology research and learning. With responsible AI practices informing the entire development process, psychology researchers at all levels can have more confidence in the AI tools they are using, as well as more confidence in the AI they may develop for their own psychological research. This session will focus on psychology research, as a starting point, with the hope other disciplines will join the ride. As technology accelerates from “zero to sixty” in a minute, its responsible creation and use is often left behind in the exhaust. We will attempt to illustrate proactive practices being utilized by various members of the psychology driving pool engaged in the AI road race.

The foundation of e-resource management tools is a quality knowledgebase, and access to electronic content fails when those management tools rest on a poor foundation. Since switching to the EBSCO knowledgebase and HLM tools in 2020, Cornell University Library has regularly expressed concerns to EBSCO about this knowledgebase, our frustrations with it, and the resulting negative impact on our users. In a partnership proposed by EBSCO, Cornell has worked closely with EBSCO over the past year to continue improving the knowledgebase, to ensure better access to all resources. These improvements benefit all users who rely on HLM tools to access their e-resources. In this session, Peter McCracken (CUL e-resources librarian, and – long ago – a co-founder of Serials Solutions) will describe the need for improved work, the work that Cornell and EBSCO have done together, and where Cornell hopes it will lead. This work is necessary if libraries want to successfully connect researchers and readers with electronic content.

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Go behind the scenes with EBSCO Product Managers as they delve into the integration of Linked Data into EBSCO Discovery Service and EBSCOhost to transform research experiences. This session will cover the infrastructure enabling Linked Data, including the new EBSCO Scholarly Graph platform, and the new product features that are enabled through this new infrastructure. Attendees will also learn how EBSCO incorporates user research to discover, validate, and refine new features to improve the user journey on EBSCO platforms.

The TERMS framework, developed by Jill Emery, Graham Stone, and Peter McCracken, postulates that e-resource resource management follows a recurring lifecycle, from evaluation to licensing to acquisitions to activation and access to discovery to management back to analysis and evaluation. This presentation intends to showcase how EBSCO's suite of products represents and enables the TERMS cycle for libraries. Attendees will leave with a better high level understanding of how EBSCO's products from GOBI to FOLIO integrate together and create a cohesive e-resource ecosystem.

We are excited to present the new Business Searching Interface (BSI), a state-of-the-art platform designed to revolutionize business research. The BSI offers an intuitive and efficient way to explore a vast array of business content, including company profiles, industry information, country economic data, and market research. With its modern design and improved navigation, the BSI enhances the user experience by providing a visually appealing and user-friendly interface.

Key features of the BSI include:
• Discover Popular Topics: Clickable images of trending business topics that launch keyword searches.
• Explore Featured Content: Access to unique business content sets and popular publications.
• Company Profile Reports: A two-level drill-down experience for detailed company information.
• Country and Industry Reports: Comprehensive reports with multiple levels of detail.
• SWOT Analyses: Easy access to relevant SWOT analyses records.
• Featured Collections and Magazines: Notable business articles and popular magazines.
• Spotlight On: Highlights articles on trending topics.

Join us for a live demonstration of the BSI, showcasing its advanced features and how it can transform business research.

Join us for an in-depth session on navigating the key features and enhancements of the updated EBSCOhost user interface. Designed to ensure a smooth transition post-migration, this session will cover the most significant UI updates, including streamlined navigation, improved search functionality, and personalized tools to optimize research workflows. We’ll also highlight troubleshooting tips, support resources, and new customization options to help you maximize the platform's potential. The session will conclude with a live Q&A, providing an opportunity to address specific questions and concerns.

Join two of our software team to learn about a variety of tools to help increase user engagement with content and drive usage of the library. This session will include a review of several free tools, as well as where to find instructions and help in implementing them. Upon completion the library should have a list of options to consider, at no charge, that will help increase access to content.

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

Linked data is at the forefront of EBSCO’s efforts to enhance information discoverability and interoperability, benefiting libraries and their communities. Our research services employ linked data, with ongoing efforts to expand its use.

This session will cover linked data basics, EBSCO’s current applications, and future plans. Topics include improving discoverability, knowledge graph development, and the resulting benefits: increased user engagement, satisfaction, and industry recognition of EBSCO’s search capabilities.

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

EBSCO Information Services has steadily grown from humble roots in the 1940’s to one of the largest global businesses focused on libraries. Marshall Breeding will conduct a tour of EBSCO through resources and data sources available on Library Technology Guides, highlighting its impressive history of business acquisitions and product development. EBSCO Industries is a diversified group of companies, including EBSCO Information Systems as its largest enterprise. Owned by the descendants of its founder, Eldon B. Stephens, EBSCO represents a distinctive ownership model that contrasts with other major industry players. The session will cover the trajectory of FOLIO, from its initial announcement in 2016 to a mature product selected by some of the world’s largest and most complex libraries and consortia. EBSCO’s support and investment in open source software is unprecedented in the industry, supporting a product strategy that blends FOLIO components with its own commercial components. This session will provide information and perspective about the factors that have led EBSCO Information Services to its strong position as a successful library vendor with products and services spanning content, discovery, and resource management.

This talk will summarize research conducted by EBSCO’s user research team on how generative AI tools like ChatGPT, SciSpace, and Semantic Scholar have shaped student research workflows. We will first take a deep-dive into the ways AI technology has (and hasn’t) shifted student mental models and expectations of research interfaces. We’ll give real-world examples from user interviews detailing how students integrate AI into various aspects of discovering, summarizing, and outlining research, as well as some of the areas where AI falls short of student needs. We’ll also discuss some of the most common barriers to student adoption of AI tools ranging from scholarly concerns over accuracy and information sources to institutional concerns over appropriate usage and academic integrity. Finally, we’ll discuss the ways these insights are guiding EBSCO’s user-centered approach to AI initiatives and what to expect from future development.

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

Research databases are both repositories of diverse forms of knowledge and instigators of knowledge production that require the community-driven, collaborative efforts of humans. Three panelists and a moderator will discuss how, with thoughtful cultivation and use, research databases can account for various practices of knowledge gathering, preservation, and creation. Case studies will include a classroom experiment in which students gather and then visualize metadata from the MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) to identify patterns in and omissions from the scholarship, with an eye toward history and new directions for research. The goal is to develop critical literacies about power relations built into bibliographic classification and indexing, as well as generate ideas for restorative description. Drawing on experience developing databases of Indigenous texts and iconography, one panelist will consider Western versus Indigenous ways of knowing: What are some of the differences between Western and Indigenous ways of interrogating received knowledge, and how might a database serve and promote Indigenous ways of knowing? What community, cultural, linguistic sensitivities, and other factors and etiquette need to be considered when building a database that serves Indigenous ways of knowing? Throughout, panelists will reflect on how the MLAIB bolsters community in the work that they do.

Join EBSCO senior product managers Heather White and Rachel Hally to learn about EBSCO’s Voice of the Customer (VOC) program and how we use data to make decisions about product development. First, Rachel will provide an overview of VOC and its evolution over the past two years into a multi-faceted program that incorporates customer feedback from numerous communication streams. Then Heather and Rachel will show us their own VOC workflows and explain how she used enhancement requests to make data-driven decisions about which features were the most important to support customers’ migration to the new UI.

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.

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