Early Adoption

This chapter provides a case study of EBSCO Discovery Service?1 at Illinois State University?s Milner Library. After a formal selection process, Milner chose EBSCO Discovery Service? to replace its federated search engine. The implementation team considered what local collections to include, ways to present catalog data, and the customizations to make. EBSCO Discovery Service?, locally called Search It, was implemented in August 2010. During the Fall, six informal usability sessions were conducted to determine Search It?s ease of use for students. Since Milner?s initial implementation, several changes have been made to Search It locally and by EBSCO. The presentation of Search It on Milner?s website also changed and became more prominent, due to a Web site redesign and user feedback. Statistics indicate that EBSCO Discovery Service? has resulted in a significant increase in Milner?s database usage.