Using a Hub embedded search box to get to the bottom branding

Using an embedded Hub search box provides an effective means to direct your users to a version of the Hub that is linked to your organisation.  Your user enters their search terms and receives a set of results available to them via your holdings.

If you click the search button without entering any search terms, in an embedded Hub search box should direct to the Hub "home page". This includes the bottom branding and some services use this as a route to direct users.

Result of a "blank" search from an embedded search box

Impact of a change to the Hub

To support better access to ebooks and local collections, an enhancement has been applied to the Hub for the majority of regional Koha LMS users.  This does not impact other integrated LMS that lack the enhancement or KSS (as at Jan 2025).  This revised experience sets a default limiter of one or more local library locations effective on all relevant Hub instance searches.  Unfortunately, this impacts anyone carrying out a "blank" search on an embedded search box as it returns a set of local results from the integrated LMS concerned.

The screen grab above shows the result on one instance.  A small set of results is returned.

Potential workarounds

Users can still get to the Hub home page / bottom branding by clicking New Search after they arrive on the site or by clicking to remove the "Location: library" limiter.  Removing the limiter would mean it was not in place for their subsequent search which is undesirable.  It may be better to promote a different route such as a short promotional URL.  

An enhancement request is in place with EBSCO to resolve this issue but it is likely that this will not happen on the current Hub user interface.