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Blogs in EBSCO databases

March 21st, 2007

An interesting development at EBSCO — is this what librarians expect when they guide students to use these databases? Does this change your perception of “authority” when it comes to subscription databases?

Researchers demanding the latest information and insight into issues have a new source of information. Blog content from premier Weblogs is being made available in online aggregated databases. Thanks to a partnership between EBSCO Publishing and NewsTex, blog content is being added to many EBSCOhost databases.

NewsTex licenses influential blog content directly from bloggers and makes the real-time content available. Blog feeds, news feeds, and historical archives will be delivered to EBSCO and added to applicable databases.

EBSCOhost is one of the most used research services with databases covering a variety of disciplines. Blog content with subject matters including art, career, economics, environment, finance, food, health, law, marketing, medical and technology will be added to nearly 100 appropriate databases.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 10:29 am and is filed under The Ethical Researcher. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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2 Responses to “Blogs in EBSCO databases”

  1. carsonpat Says:
    March 21st, 2007 at 11:21 am

    Who is running the blog? Are entries screened before ‘publication’? Will students be citing the main article or the personal comments.

    We need to be willing to give this a try – selling blogs as a reliable source, no matter what Ebsco says, could be the issue with some teachers.

  2. Damon Says:
    March 22nd, 2007 at 2:05 pm

    Folks at EBSCO e-mailed us with the following clarification:

    “I saw the post about blog content in EBSCOhost. I wanted to let you know that we aren’t opening up our databases to blogs. We have licensed blog content from NewsTex which has been praised for its selection process and has standards for the blogs it licenses.

    As far as blogs showing up in search results, blogs will not be co-mingled with search results and given the highly customizable nature of our adminstrative functions in EBSCOadmin, librarians will be able to decide whether or not to include blog content in result lists.

    Initially this will impact more business and corporate databases, the searchers of whom are interested in real time information and commentary on current issues and we see blogs as a way to answer that need.”

    Still interesting though… I wonder if we can find out more about the “selection process” and “standards” for blog posts. Can students apply some of the same evaluative techniques when they are doing their own research on the Web?