The Krafty Librarian

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

New Look for EBSCOhost

Summer 2008, EBSCOhost will have a new look and feel. This will be the first redesign since 2002. They are calling it EBSCOhost 2.0. Just like Oldsmobile, this is not your father's EBSCOhost. It is a totally new look.

If you are curious about it, check out an overview of EBSCOhost 2.0 (Flash demo).

Here are some changes I noticed.
It has a completely new look and feel. Parts of it are similar to Ovid's new design. The Narrow Results box is on the left hand side of the screen and the Limit Box is on the right hand side of the screen. One nice feature is these boxes can be collapsed so that the results occupy the entire width of the screen.

Citations can be displayed by relevance or date. The relevancy rankings of each citation is also displayed. I am a little worried about relevancy ranking. After dealing with it in Ovid's Basic search which does natural language processing, I am curious as to what EBSCO is doing and how they determine relevancy.

Images from journal articles are displayed in Quick Review, which means it displays the thumbnails right below the citation.

The one thing I thought that was very cool was the citation hover. Hover your mouse over an icon of magnifying glass (next to the citation) and a little window bubble appears showing the citation and the abstract of the article. You don't have to leave the results list to read the abstract.

This summer will be interesting as librarians will be able to use the new version.

2 Comments:

At 3:51 PM, Gregg said...: Thanks for the link, Krafty. I really like what they have done with updating and enhancing the usability of the interface. I'll be sure that my colleagues get this link as we use EBSCOhost for accessing many databases here at SLU.
At 11:30 AM, Mary C said...: I also checked out the flash demo and was pleasantly surprised at the whole new interface. Very impressive. I also thought it was quite similar to OVID's new look. No surprise that EBSCO is going to have to compete with other vendors. I also questioned the relevancy ranking; personally, when I do a search I prefer to sort my results by published date. I guess that is a lot like PubMed's displayed results (as default, I think). Anyway, since I have an EBSCO subscription I am looking forward to the new look this summer.