Comments on: User Hostility: EBSCOhost Connection

By: ?f | YOUR STUPID LIBRARY BRANDING HERE pts. 1 and 2

?f | YOUR STUPID LIBRARY BRANDING HERE pts. 1 and 2 — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 04:47:05 +0000

[...] wrote recently about EBSCOHost Connection, a service from EBSCO that puts their source material into search engines, then lets end users log [...]

By: EBSCOhost Connection Records Found In-The-Wild | Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 02:37:49 +0000

[...] within your library’s EBSCOhost resources.This sounds like a good idea, but until I saw a post last week from Aaron Schmidt on his Walking Paper blog, I hadn’t really seen any of these [...]

By: Peter Murray

Peter Murray — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:27:51 +0000

I was able to access it when I was inside an IP address range recognized by EBSCOhost. From outside, though, I was presented with a search system to identify my library, which I did. Selecting the library link, though, and going through the “We need to log you in” splash page brought me to a generic EBSCOhost login screen. It is the same problem you saw — nothing entered here gets me into EBSCOhost. A colleague helped me get into EBSCOadmin at MPOW and we turned on the Proxy setting, but that still didn’t help. Something isn’t quite right…

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:53:14 +0000

Thanks for reporting, Peter. Were you able to access the full text? Was it IP authentication or a login?

By: Peter Murray

Peter Murray — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:51:14 +0000

It worked for me — hit number six.

I must admit, as a fairly active Google web search user, this is the first EBSCO Connect result hit that I’ve encountered. And the program has been in place for three years? I like how the results display, but it is somewhat disappointing that the results don’t show up more often. It probably has something to do with the lack of inbound links to the EBSCO Connect URLs resulting in a lower page rank.

Now that I have an example, though, it is time to do some more investigations…

By: Kate

Kate — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 20:53:02 +0000

Aaron, The Oregon State Library recently switched from EBSCO to Gale for the Statewide Database Licensing program. http://www.oregon.gov/OSL/LD/technology/sdlp/index.shtml

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:28:46 +0000

Richard,
I wasn’t in a rush to crush the concept. I was really excited about it at first. However, the service has been out for over three years. That’s eons in internet time, plenty of time to iron out problems if they cared to.

Very good point about the state library though. Perhaps they’re not aware of the problem. I know the folks there, and they’re sharp, so maybe it never came to their attention.

By: Stephen Francoeur

Stephen Francoeur — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:08:19 +0000

Gale pushed out out of these useless sites on the web a few years ago, too: AccessMyLibrary.

By: richard james

richard james — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 19:06:39 +0000

I don’t understand the rush to crush the concept- I think that it’s a neat idea, but it is one that is going to take a while to reach a critical mass of either content or subscriber awareness. Snarking about it on a blog isn’t going to make it better, since the database administrator at the state library needs to work with EBSCO to set up the profiles and could probably make them more accessible or obvious with constructive assistance when problems like this are encountered

By: laura

laura — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:55:59 +0000

I’m in the library and got through to the full article fine with just a couple of clicks, but I suspect that’s more the exception than the rule. I sometimes wonder if it would be possible to set up some mechanism whereby EBSCO et al. would allow their content on the open web and libraries would all pay into a fund that helped support that. Seems doubtful, though.

By: Jeff Scott

Jeff Scott — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:44:19 +0000

Ebsco’s attitude (and this may be catering to academic libraries) is that the public isn’t smart enough to use this database so it shouldn’t be easily accessible. I tried creating a path to get into just Consumer Reports of the Master File Premier from Ebsco and it is a huge pain! You can create these links and put them into the public realm, but it doesn’t link through the IP or even through a password. It can only come from the url you provided to ebsco. So you have these tools, but they don’t actually work.

Ebsco also threatened to shut out libraries that allowed online card applications because it allowed any user to backdoor into their system. That’s a really great vendor…They really care….

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:11:27 +0000

http://www.google.com/search?q=triumph+triple+connection&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

triumph triple connection

LMK if it works for you.

By: Peter Murray

Peter Murray — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:08:27 +0000

What as the search phrase in Google you used to pick it up? I’d like to try to replicate it here…