EBSCOhost^® Delivers Enhanced Medical Search Experience
New Features & Functionality Benefit users of EBSCO's Suite of Medical Databases Including CINAHL^® and MEDLINE^®

IPSWICH, Mass. - November 30, 2006 - In light of the stringent requirements of today's medical researchers, EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) is committed to the development, expansion and ongoing refinement of its suite of clinical and health-related resources. Through a combination of guidance from multiple focus groups and overall customer feedback, as well as the efforts of EBSCO's dedicated medical product development staff, the company has successfully implemented several new features within EBSCOhost^®. In addition to these recent enhancements, EBSCO has positioned itself for continued product development that parallels the evolving information needs as expressed by the medical community.

Gaining Customer Input & Implementing Suggestions
During the MLA (Medical Library Association) annual conference, EBSCO held focus groups with existing customers as well as non-customers to gain specific feedback for improvements to the EBSCOhost search experience. Additionally, the company released questionnaires and garnered additional customer input directly through its sales and service staff. Further, EBSCO was (and remains) proactive in following-up with listserv postings in the medical community to gain further insight from those with specific concerns and ideas. EBSCO's Biomedical Services & Customer Support Manager, Ellen Westling, MLS, AHIP, is the primary liaison between EBSCO's development teams and customers who make themselves available to assist EBSCO through their insights. As a librarian with many years of working experience in the medical community, Westling understands the diverse needs and nuances of the various health care professionals, and is in a perfect position to facilitate dialog between the two groups. "Over the past several months the level of customer participation in our focus groups and feedback initiatives has been amazing," Westling said. "We have been able to gain a deeper understanding of not only the specific features that a user would expect to have available in EBSCOhost, but also the most appropriate and effective way to implement these key items. My time is still spent almost entirely communicating with customers, as our goal is to continue to offer enhancements that will further elevate our services."

New EBSCOhost Features for Medical Databases
Some of the new/enhanced features in EBSCOhost that benefit medical researchers include:

• In CINAHL^®, MEDLINE^®, the subject authority (thesaurus) screen has been improved to include a combination of requested changes to search options, more intuitive use of thesaurus terms, and smoother navigation requiring fewer clicks.
• The Search History layout on the Advanced Search Screen has been streamlined, with fewer columns and a more efficient layout, while saved searches are now appended to a user's search history.
• An Export option is now included with Email and Save delivery options, bringing the feature more to the forefront, and eliminating the need for additional clicks.
• The Find field on the Advanced, Guided Style Search Screen will dynamically expand (once a search has been executed) to show complete search strings for queries that are longer than the initial search box allows.
• An "Ask-A-Librarian" link has been added within EBSCOhost (enabled at the library administrator's discretion) to allow users to send an email inquiry directly to their librarian (or any other designated recipient). Users sending an email request through this feature can elect to also include applicable search history to better illustrate their inquiry.

Experiences & Examples of Customer-Driven Product Development
In 2003, EBSCO acquired Cinahl Information Systems, developers of The CINAHL Database, and immediately embarked upon a series of database enhancements (content and interface). These initiatives have elevated the existing CINAHL database to new heights and set even higher standards for nursing research through the development of full-text versions of the database: CINAHL^® with Full Text and CINAHL^® Plus with Full Text.

Some of the current and previous enhancements to CINAHL's search experience have been engineered to help ease the transition for those customers previously using CINAHL via another vendor interface. As of January 2007, all new and renewal subscriptions to the various CINAHL databases will be handled directly by EBSCO and made available solely on the EBSCOhost platform. By ensuring that existing customers of CINAHL can continue to utilize the database in many of the ways that they have grown accustomed to, they will be able to more easily migrate to the EBSCOhost version that now includes many of these familiar features. Further still, users can take advantage of the additional content and features brought about by EBSCO that were previously unavailable to them.

Aside from content additions made specifically to CINAHL, many of the enhancements made to the search experience provided by the EBSCOhost interface are of equal benefit to users of other medical databases offered by EBSCO such as MEDLINE and its full-text counterpart, MEDLINE^® with Full Text. Furthermore, EBSCO has introduced the EBSCOhost Integration Toolkit™, which allows medical facilities to incorporate research databases and point-of-care resources into the everyday workflow, including dynamic integration with Electronic Medical Records.

For more information regarding EBSCO's medical products and services, please visit: http://www.ebscohost.com/biomedical.

About EBSCO
EBSCO Publishing is the world's premier database aggregator, offering a suite of more than 200 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all medical researchers. The company's product lines include proprietary databases such as CINAHL^®, DynaMed™, SocINDEX™, and SPORTDiscus™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as MEDLINE^®, PsycARTICLES^® and PsycINFO^®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost^®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: http://www.ebscohost.com, or contact EBSCO Publishing.

EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.