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Spent the morning in a committee meeting and then had lunch on EBSCO for their Academic Librarian’s Lunch. They usually make interesting announcements at these things (in Chicago this past summer they announced their Discovery Service) so I was curious as to what was coming. Two items of interest came out. First EBSCO is tweaking their relevancy ranking and in the summer they will make it the universal default sort for all non-medical subscribers. We already have relevancy set as our default sort in EBSCO but the new rankings (they say) will be even better. They are going to rank first on subject headings then on keywords in title, abstracts and authors. Other things taken into account will be length of article, non reviews, date and other options. I look forward to seeing the results – the new relevancy sorting will be active February 1st.

The second and perhaps more important announcement had to do with popular magazine titles. According to EBSCO publishers of these titles told aggregators in the fall they were going to go with a single source and put out the request for RFPs. EBSCO won the RFP with all publishers. This means to going forward they will be the ONLY aggregator providing access to titles like Time, Sports Ilustrated, US News & World Report, People, History Today, Fortune, Forbes, Money, Science, Discover, Scientific American, National Review, New Republic and a whole host of other titles. For some, like Time, they will also be the only historical repository for back issues. Kinda makes you wonder if we need any other multi-subject database outside of Academic Search Premiere?

I am now waiting for Al Gore to begin and will blog that if he reveals anything of significance! The room is filling up fast!