Advanced Linking to EBSCOhost Content

Modified on Wed, 17 May, 2023 at 10:22 PM

LibKey provides the ability to provide best-in-class linking from hundreds of supported publishers to content on the EBSCOhost platform. While LibKey has always linked to EBSCOhost, this added enhancement provides three significant advantages:

  1. Direct to PDF Linking – Standard links to EBSCOhost typically result in landing on the article detail page. With advanced linking, links from LibKey will instead land the user directly on the PDF viewer on the EBSCOhost platform, providing a single click to content experience consistent with PDF linking LibKey provides to hundreds of other publishers.

  2. Identifier Based Linking – Standard links to EBSCOhost are performed using traditional openURL linking. While often reliable, OpenURL can suffer in linking accuracy due to incorrect/insufficient data between the source and the host platforms sometimes leading to the wrong article, multiple article results or outright failures. By moving to an identifier based linking scheme, LibKey can offer highly accurate linking to EBSCOhost, just as we do for publisher platforms.

  3. Entitlements Confirmation – Due to the nature of aggregation, content may not be immediately available when the publisher releases it and these availability times can vary. To prevent user confusion and frustration LibKey will automatically confirm the availability of content on EBSCOhost before presenting a link to the user!


The EBSCO advanced linking is typically enabled on all new accounts as they are initially configured, and has been proactively configured on many existing accounts. 


If you are unsure whether this is yet configured, please send us a message at [email protected] or open a new ticket using the support portal.


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For libraries that do not yet have this configured, please complete this simple setup form: https://thirdiron.com/browzine-libkey-enhanced-ebsco-linking-setup/


To enable this feature, particular information is needed from a library's EBSCOhost admin.  





As seen above, Third Iron support needs to receive:

Customer ID ("s1234567" in the above example)
Group ID ("main" in the above example)
Profile ID ("ehost" in the above example)

Fill out this setup form with your details and our team will be in touch!