2025 EBSCO User Group

This session addresses one of the most common questions we hear: When will Mosaic be ready for my library? It’s a town hall-style forum designed to encourage open dialogue and direct engagement with customers, EBSCO/GOBI staff, and Innovation Partners. Instead of presenting canned information, this session creates an interactive space to answer live questions and discuss Mosaic’s capabilities, readiness, and future.

Evidence-Based Acquisitions (EBA) has become an increasingly popular and efficient way for libraries to curate monograph collections based on actual usage data. While many of the largest and most prolific publishers offer EBA programs, managing multiple agreements and processes can place a heavy burden on library staff. However, when available, running an EBA program through GOBI Library Solutions offers several key advantages that streamline the process and enhance collection development efforts.

Using GOBI for your EBA program centralizes management, providing a single platform to handle multiple publisher agreements, simplifying workflows, and integrating usage data in a user-friendly way. Additionally, GOBI offers robust reporting tools and seamless integration with existing library systems, helping libraries make more informed decisions with less administrative overhead.

In this session, hear from the Head of Acquisitions at URI on the importance of EBAs in meeting their collection development goals, how they successfully implement EBA at their institution, and why they advocate for publishers to work through GOBI. You’ll also hear from a GOBI Collection Development Manager, who will share insights on the benefits of running an EBA program through GOBI and the details that make it an indispensable tool for libraries.

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.

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.

With changes in staffing, increasing complexity in workflows, and more demands on staff time, GOBI can help you with the day-to-day of your Library Technical Services. Using GOBI to streamline your Ordering process can enable automated acquisitions and brief records from GOBI into your Library Management System. A range of Cataloging Services, from basic to advanced, can help your catalogers have time to work on the rare materials, special collections, and donated items. Whilst many libraries are moving towards electronic materials, print materials are still necessary in many libraries. Customize your needs with GOBI’s Book Processing services. This session will enumerate the many areas GOBI can assist you in saving time and creating efficiencies for your Technical Services team.

Join us for an in-depth presentation on the enhancements and customizations we've implemented in the new Discovery UI, developed in collaboration with the expert support of our EBSCO Library Services engineer. Highlights include features like a 24/7 chat image, streamlined catalog integration, and custom labels tailored to user needs. We'll also share insights into our decision-making process, incorporating user feedback forms, in-house support documentation, and collaborative discussion methods such as Librarian Q&A sessions and faculty training. This session is ideal for those seeking practical strategies for improving user engagement and streamlining library services.

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

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 

This session will guide you through the basics and explore trends in Transformative Agreements (TAs), including how they aim to transition traditional subscription models to open access and their implications for libraries. We will discuss their role in advancing open scholarship, the challenges they pose in terms of budgeting and administration, and how libraries can strategically assess their value. Following this, we’ll introduce the features of our innovative Read and Publish Dashboards. These dashboards integrate serials management with SaaS, providing actionable insights into your library’s data to help you make informed decisions about usage and expenditures. Whether your library is managing multiple Transformative Agreements or is just beginning to explore them, this session will deliver practical tools and insights to optimize your approach and make the most of these evolving models.