University of Memphis Libraries employs an integrated discovery service layer with EBSCO Discovery Service powering the Innovative Interfaces, Inc. Encore Duet platform. Recently, despite initial reservations about overwhelming users and librarians with search results, we decided to turn on over 2.7 million EBSCO “discovery ebooks.” These ebooks’ full-text indexing allows users to identify relevant materials beyond, and within, our holdings. This study documents our attempt to harness full-text searching to promote our increasingly under-used print collections by optimizing “discovery ebooks” display using custom resolver links and by understanding the extent to which this collection replicated existing print and electronic holding. Discovery ebook full text searching offers manageable recall, especially for unique or sufficiently qualified proper nouns (names, movements, styles, etc.) with a promising success rate for locating locally-held and useful print materials for which the search terms do not appear in MARC catalog records or other metadata. Our initial study focused on our 22,210 circulating art books (LC Class N1-NX820) in which we discovered a rate of overlap with accessible ebooks at a rate of approximately 10% (N=2,479). Phase two compared a sample (N=2,707) of “discovery ebooks” published between 1947 and 2010 to which we do not have e-access (EDS subject search for “ART”). We discovered title matches against our print holdings at an average rate of 22% (trending lower for new publications and as high as 56% for older publications). After establishing much of the discovery content available within our collection, we customized EDS Full Text Finder link resolvers to point users to our WorldCat Local page to see local holdings or, if necessary, request the item via interlibrary loan. This paper will describe strategies for implementation and promotion, initial results, successes and obstacles, and explore implications for expansion and future work.
