All profiles
In UMBC's instance of EBSCO Admin (https://eadmin.ebscohost.com/EAdmin/login.aspx), you have control over nine sites, i.e. USMAI campuses with EDS, and a varying number of groups (i.e. EDS profile groups) in each site. The UMBC administrator is of course primarily concerned with the profile groups for the UMBC campus. As of this writing, we have six profile groups, but only two of them are consistently used - the main user group and the testing user group. There are over a dozen profiles in each of these two groups. Most of them are from past experiments and trials; each of the groups could use some cleaning up.
Although it is possible to use the 'main' user group for test profiles and vice versa (and I have been guilty of doing the former), it is of course best practice to keep the 'active' profiles - i.e. the ones provided to users - in the main user group while relegating test profiles to the testing user group. Our currently active profiles are onesearch (which is the "everything search"), media2 (the "books and media profile" and article2 ("article search") in the main user group.
Active Profiles
The purposes of our three active profiles are straightforward:
Onesearch is the "full" instance of EDS, containing everything we can put into it that makes sense for our users and link from (at least reasonably well).
Media2 is our de facto catalog interface for many users, with added content from EBSCO Ebooks, Alexander Street (streaming video) and Naxos (streaming music audio), plus an AP photo/video feed.
Article2 is for article searching. It is limited to (mostly) article content in two ways: First, it has all the book-only and mostly-book databases removed. Second, there is a NOT string appended to users' searches from the profile's search box on our website and from the search fields within the profile interface. That NOT string cuts out results by publication type (PT). It begins "NOT (PT book OR PT Monograph OR PT ebook OR...." and continues with other pubtypes.
Note: 'pfi' is the profile for 'Publication Finder', otherwise known as the A-Z list. This profile has few options and rarely needs any changes.
Test Profiles
The purpose of the test profiles is quite varied. Going forward, it is generally best practice to create a test profile for a specific purpose, rather then re-using a past test profile (this explains the large number of test profiles). When you want to test an EBSCO app or widget, or want to isolate a database to see how its linking is behaving, or need to perform any other test that might significantly alter the user experience in an active profile, you want to create a test profile.
To create a test profile (or a profile in any group), go to Profile Maintenance → Copy Profiles. On that page, make sure the top 'group' field is on 'main user group' and the 'site' is set to UMBC, then go to the drop-down menu for 'description (profile ID)', and pick one of the three active profiles. Then go down to the second (destination) group drop-down menu and choose 'testing user group.' Create a memorable profile ID, hit 'select all', and then hit 'submit' at the bottom of the page. Voila - you have created a test profile.
NOTE: The above method for creating a test profile presumes that you want to create your test profile as a variation of one of the three active profiles. This should be the case in most instances. If you want to create an EDS profile from scratch, you can 'add a new profile' at the second step instead.
Custom Profiles
You can create a custom profile for pretty much any resource or group of resources that EBSCO offers. There are two ways to do this:
1) Create an EDS profile using the above method, configuring it the way you want (or the way a faculty member wants, etc.) by limiting it to certain databases or providing/removing certain features, and then distributing the URL for that profile. The URL will be http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=cookie,ip,guest&custid=baltcnty&groupid=test&profile={various}, with the "various" element (not in brackets) replaced by the profile ID. This will work for any EBSCO resource(s).
2 Use the default Ebscohost URL (http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=ehost&defaultdb=(database code) ) and change the database code to whichever of the Ebscohost databases you want to include (there is a complete list at https://connect.ebsco.com/s/article/EBSCOhost-Database-Short-Names-List?language=en_US). If you are creating a custom profile for more than one Ebscohost resource, separate the codes with commas (e.g. &defaultdb=asn,bth,joh). This will work only for Ebscohost databases.