Customer Spotlight: Exploring the Emerald Insight Web Solution
Publisher Overview:Emerald publishes the world's widest range of management and library information services journals, as well as a strong specialist range of engineering, applied science and technology journals. Emerald prides itself on being at the forefront of technology and led the way by launching its first electronic product, Emerald Intelligence + Fulltext in 1996 (now Emerald Fulltext).
Its electronic collection of journals is designed to meet the increasing demands for electronic access, particularly amongst academic libraries. Emerald products are now firmly established as major resources for management research in both academic and corporate institutions throughout the world.
The Emerald Objective: A Brief History and Future Goals
In 2001 Emerald was substantially improved and extended with a range of new products and services. This new unified service, supported and provided by Ingenta, facilitates access to all of the Emerald products, including Emerald Management Reviews and Emerald Abstracts, which were formerly delivered by Anbar Electronic Intelligence.
Emerald Insight is a highly successful, popular and fully functioning site and yet, it is a site continually in development.
Following its launch Emerald has consistently approached Ingenta to develop and enhance new features and products to add to those already deployed. Ingenta has been able to accommodate and fulfil these requests because of the robust and flexible infrastructure created to support the needs of publishers such as Emerald. This flexible underlying architecture allows the easy addition of new products such as AI databases, new journals and new features, as well as enabling Emerald to implement market driven initiatives such as SFX and effectively respond to user feedback.
A recent project has been undertaken to improve and extend the search and browse functionality of the core Emerald products. After conducting significant user testing and research Emerald approached Ingenta with the project, Emerald 2003, with the view to launch in early 2003.
Scope of the Project:
Emerald 2003 includes a redesign of the search and browse user interface along with various new features and tools including marked search hits, search within search results and improved help features.
In order to facilitate further user feedback and provide a preview for users, Emerald requested that the new features initially run in parallel on the live service with the existing ones. Users were then able to switch between the exiting and proposed interface options/features and provide feedback.
Emerald 2003 officially launched on Friday, 14 March 2003. "The debut of Emerald Fulltext 2003 is a credit to our customers and stakeholders who have willingly given their time and ideas to help us improve the database," notes Gill Crawford, Head of Corporate Communications. "The new database realizes our commitment to offering customer-focused services in a flexible and dynamic Internet database environment and Ingenta's help in achieving this has been invaluable."
Have a Look Online:
The Emerald site can be found at www.emeraldinsight.com. If you have access to the full text database, we encourage you to explore this area of the site, where its improved features are most visible.
Experienced Emerald users will notice many modifications and improvements designed to increase the intuitive nature of the search and browse controls. Whereas new users can access the additional features such as marked search hits and search within search results by carrying out a quick search (for example: change control) in the full text database. Each result provides the ability to add the selected item to a marked list. This list is then accessible from the left hand menu. Users wishing to search within these search results can do so by selecting the appropriate link across the top of the results page.
Questions or Suggestions for future Customer Spotlight feature articles?
We’d like to answer your questions or tell you more about specific components of this project. Please email our customer service team if you would like to learn more, or suggest another Ingenta publishing customer to be featured in the Customer Spotlight.