Credo Reference Blog

Credo recently launched a partnership with EasyBib, an online bibliography tool. [Read the announcement here] We first became aware of this tool last spring during a student focus group we hosted. We gathered students from colleges and universities in the Northeast. The institutions represented in the focus group included Harvard University, Yale University, UMass Lowell, Suffolk University, and Boston University.

Over the course of the session the students made it extremely clear that they loved EasyBib, as it made their research efforts so much easier. In fact, they were passionate about the product. [See what a college professor had to say about EasyBib in the Chronicle of Higher Education]

Through a bit of our own investigation and in conversations with EasyBib’s co-founders Neal and Darshan, we found out that EasyBib is the #1 search result in Google for both the term “bibliography” and “citation”. We also learned that it has millions of monthly users spending an average of 9 minutes on the site per session. Finally, we read a professor’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he positively reviewed the service and gave it his thumbs up. Most importantly, we connected with two young entrepreneurs committed to helping make the overall research effort easier and more effective for today’s students.

Further discussions led to the formation of a formal partnership, which includes a linking relationship on each of our sites and Credo distributing EasyBib to the academic library market.

Linking to Credo Reference from EasyBib
By being featured prominently on the EasyBib site, Credo is made visible to millions of students that otherwise would not be aware of Credo and the library resources that can be seamlessly accessed through Credo. Essentially, this provides marketing of our customers’ libraries resources during a students’ research effort.

Linking to EasyBib from Credo Reference
You will notice that every Credo entry has a link to EasyBib right at the top. With this link we are trying to make an even stronger connection with today’s users who are likely to already be aware of EasyBib. We believe this makes users feel more comfortable with Credo, just as they feel at ease seeing links to the social bookmarking sites with which they are already familiar.

Credo Reference distribution of EasyBib
By offering libraries the opportunity to subscribe to EasyBib for their students, we are providing them with a low cost alternative to other more expensive products that often have less student usage. Admittedly, EasyBib has less functionality than these other products, which might be a large part of its appeal to students. Subscriptions to EasyBib will be seamlessly integrated with the Credo subscription. Ads will not be visible on the EasyBib site and your users will have access to the full functionality of EasyBib.

Perhaps most importantly, libraries will be providing a tool to their users that is already extremely popular among millions of students. If you would like to see a Google Analytics chart with the traffic from your institution to EasyBib, please click here.