EBSCO integration

[nairiboo]

In simple terms, our goal is to provide access to the approximately 300 (and rapidly growing) institutional higher ed customers of ours to a core service nearly all of them subscribe to from a company called EBSCO.

EBSCO is a company that provides an “aggregation service” to the world’s higher education libraries, allowing students and faculty a single point of access to the massive amounts of content that they license. Because the licensed content can come from hundreds or even thousands of different individuals publishers and services, aggregators like EBSCO or Proquest simplify the technical demands of that access.

EBSCO in particular provides a search function (often the “one box” search such as, for instance, at library.stanford.edu). The catalog is searched and the matching document list is returned. The user can click on the result, and the document is streamed to their browser or desktop.

Currently, Hypothesis allows students and instructors to be live with eachother in every page of all the material for their courses.

Typically the material for the course is in the LMS syllabus like any class, and using the capability in any major LMS (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, D2L, Sakai, etc) Hypothesis can be brought into contact with it.

In order to choose the specific document that the instructor wants, we can pull from (for instance) Canvas files, Google drive, anything on the web, anything in JSTOR, etc. but what we can't do (yet) is pull from any resource that the school has licensed through EBSCO.  We think that would be a powerful capability that users would love. It would also put EBSCO front and center in this particular workflow, which is a benefit to them.

Because students also participate heavily in the annotation process, it would be more helpful to say that with the EBSCO integration they should be able to directly search for and pull a given document into their LMS to be shared with students for annotation."