EBSCO is advancing toward its two-tiered goal of offering not only the world's largest full text databases, but also a great number of the most popular secondary databases. The linking functionality of EBSCOhost^® allows users to conduct in-depth searches of these secondary databases, and seamlessly locate full text from thousands of journals - many of which come from EBSCO's full text databases. MLA International Bibliography will soon be part of the growing list of secondary databases available via EBSCOhost.

MLA International Bibliography is an index of journal articles, books and dissertations. Produced by the Modern Language Association, the electronic version of the bibliography dates back to 1963 and contains over 1.5 million citations from more than 4,400 journals and series and 1,000 book publishers.

Coverage is international and subjects include literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing. Now listings on rhetoric and composition and the history, theory and practice of teaching language and literature are also included. In addition to the bibliography, EBSCO plans to include the MLA Directory of Periodicals and the association's proprietary thesaurus used to assign descriptors to each record in the bibliography. This database will be available via EBSCOhost by August 2002.

According to Tim Collins, EBSCO Publishing's Division General Manager, the company has experienced dramatic growth in its sales of secondary databases. "It has taken some time for many libraries to realize that we are not simply a provider of full text, but really a full service aggregator. Our aim is to provide a one-stop research environment for end-users. This entails not only offering the most complete full text collections, but also secondary databases, and the ability to link these and other sources together to form a cohesive search system for libraries."

Collins continued, "Many of our customers, including those at the state-wide level, began using EBSCOhost for our full text services, but have moved on to accessing a complete suite of secondary databases as well. We intend to continue to enhance the EBSCOhost service through software functionality improvements, licensing additional full text publications, creating new full text aggregated databases, and releasing several additional secondary databases."

Released: May 14, 2002