A Shopping Cart for Research

"It's like the 'Shopping Cart' on Amazon.com," says EBSCO's communications manager, Scott Bernier, referring to the Web site's ability to let shoppers store their selections for as long as they desire, without actually checking out. Now with My EBSCOhost, users can retrieve their previously gathered data—including links to searches, search histories, articles, alerts, and Web sites—at a later date.

Vickye Drury, a resource librarian with the Forth Worth (TX) Independent School District, finds the new program helpful for educators and students. "It's also great for the teacher working on a graduate degree," she says. "Teachers can get pretty busy, and this enhancement prevents them from having to start a research session from scratch every time." Drury especially likes My EBSCOhost's alert feature, which periodically e-mails educators updates on journal articles pertaining to their research.

EBSCO has also retooled its Web-site design tool, Page Composer, placing it within My EBSCOhost. That way, users won't have to log in to a separate service to use Page Composer to create their own Web pages. Even better, research can now be saved within a personalized folder for future editing, or it can be e-mailed as a file to be posted online on the user's Web site. My EBSCOhost is free to subscribers of EBSCO databases.