What determines when articles are:

Available as direct PDF full text?

Available as Linked Full Text, or

Available as full text but behind Find It (and sometimes subsequent menus)?

And why does the ‘find it’ link in EDS sometimes take you to a paywall?

To answer these questions, let's back up to the question of how records get into EDS in the first place: All results available to populate result sets that come in response to a search in EDS come from the list of enabled databases. When these databases are enabled in EDS, everything in them becomes available as search results - whether we have access to a given item or not.

There are ways to limit database content to only material we have access to, but this is usually inadvisable for three reasons:

1. it removes records for items that patrons might want to order through ILL

2. it is impossible to maintain these frequently-changing limits on the 140+ databases in EDS

3. it is often difficult to determine just what material will be available in the first place. 

It is because of the third reason that EDS linking includes more than just EBSCO links.

Why do records in the "Everything" search sometimes have the Find It button, and then the user needs to navigate through the EBSCO menu of years/issues for that journal to get to the particular article, but then other times the article is available directly through a PDF Full Text link?

• Results appear with full text attached sometimes and not others because of deduplication; records for articles often come from multiple sources, and sometimes the one that 'gets there' first, wins - i.e. appears - while the others are deduped and don't appear. Records with full-text attached are *supposed* to get preference, but the reality is that they don't always.

• EBSCO “smart links” that navigate the Holdings Management and Ebscohost systems are set up to first try to connect at the ‘article level.’ If this fails (and it can fail for a variety of reasons), the link makes a second try, at the ‘journal level’; if that succeeds, you get either an Ebscohost year/volume tree or a similar result on a vendor page. Partner database links will sometimes exhibit the same behavior on vendor pages. 

What determines when articles are available as direct PDF full text or HTML?

When articles appear with a PDF or HTML full text attached, that means they come from one of EBSCO's proprietary databases, such as Academic Search Ultimate, Complementary Index, or Supplementary Index. That is to say, Ebsco owns/directly licenses the article, so they don't (usually) have to send you to the publisher platform.

What determines when results are available as “Linked Full Text?”

• Linked Full Text is for journals indexed under EBSCO's old Electronic Journals Service system. The LFT link resolver is designed to search within the metadata specific to that system. It is intermittently less reliable than the newer Full Text Finder system.

What is "Find It"?

• 'Find It' is the button that covers up all EDS 'custom links’ (except for ‘Linked Full Text.’)

Thorough review of links is problematic. For most sources, reviews can be done on at least five bases:

1. One-database-to-openURL-link

2. Multiple databases-to-openURL-link

3. One-database-to-FTF-link

4. Multiple-database-to-FTF link

5. Direct comparison to vendor platform results

• When methodical/complete testing hasn’t occurred for a while for a given link, what often substitutes is gaps and errors reported by Reference staff and users.

• What to look for: if all full-text custom links fail for a particular result, it will either appear with no link or an ILL link. For the latter, be on the lookout for an ILL/database mismatch, e.g. an ILL link on a result from a major database such as JSTOR or Science Direct.