What is the main advantage of using an intermediary service to access electronic journals?

What is the main advantage of using an intermediary service to access electronic journals?

• A. It eliminates the need for search tools
• B. One search engine will search the contents of Journals for several publishers and/or disciplines
• C. It increases local storage requirements
• D. It restricts access to a single publisher

Answer: (B)

Intermediary services provide a single discovery layer that lets you search across journals from many publishers and disciplines at once. This means you don’t have to hop from publisher site to publisher site to find articles; you get a unified set of results and can quickly tell what your library subscribes to and access full text when available. That broad, cross-publisher reach and the efficiency of one search interface is the main advantage. Other options miss the point: the service still uses search tools; it doesn’t demand more local storage; and rather than locking you to one publisher, it expands access across multiple publishers.

Intermediary services provide a single discovery layer that lets you search across journals from many publishers and disciplines at once. This means you don’t have to hop from publisher site to publisher site to find articles; you get a unified set of results and can quickly tell what your library subscribes to and access full text when available. That broad, cross-publisher reach and the efficiency of one search interface is the main advantage. Other options miss the point: the service still uses search tools; it doesn’t demand more local storage; and rather than locking you to one publisher, it expands access across multiple publishers.