After a discussion at Datasets, we are looking to take out a subscription to ProQuest’s Academic Complete database. We’re just in the process of organizing a trial now so we can check it out. Academic Complete is a collection of eBooks covering a wide variety of eBook titles from core publishers. Access is similar to the Ebrary/EBL experience with digital rights management (DRM). This action will be accompanied by a review and a reduction in size in our patron-driven eBook profile.
What’s the rationale for this?
Mainly to reduce our eBook opex costs (for EBL short term loans) which have risen substantially over the past year and consumed a third of our non-continuing budget in 2015. This was due largely to fluctuations in usage and publisher price increases which have increased for short term loans – as much as 40% of the cost of the book for just a one day loan in some cases. Another wave of publishers increased their STL prices at the end of 2015. If we don’t take any action now, EBL short term loans have the potential to consume an even greater chunk of our non-continuing budget in 2016. The $NZ remains lower against the $US than at levels previously enjoyed which means we need a variety of approaches to help the money go around further and to stay within budget.
What are some of the advantages?
The main advantage is to provide unlimited access to a wider range of eBook content in a more cost-effective way. A subscription to Academic Complete will cost us about 20% of what we’re currently spending on short term eBook loans. Academic Complete provides access to over 100,000 eBook titles compared with ~30,000 titles on our patron-driven eBook profile. The cost savings will help us to better manage our budget for non-continuing resources.
What are some of the potential problems?
There will be duplication of content on Academic Complete with what we have purchased already. There is about 25% crossover of Academic Complete content with our patron-driven profile and what we’ve purchased already. So some eBook content currently available as patron-driven access will no longer be available because of our need to reduce the size of our patron-driven profile. Because Academic Complete is an aggregator database (like InfoTrac or ProQuest 5000) we won’t have the same ability to control titles and subjects accessible to our users, which means in addition to titles from core publishers there will be content that is not relevant to UC. This will likely have implications for discovery results. DRM is not as user-friendly and by providing access to Academic Complete we will be providing a lot of content that has DRM. (Although access currently provided via EBL short term loans is also DRM). In an ideal world, we’d much prefer to provide more access to DRM-free content although it was great we were able to purchase the DRM-free Taylor & Francis and Springer eBooks end of last year.
Mitigation
We’ll do a short trial of Academic Complete first of all. We’re expecting Academic Complete will be upgraded to the ProQuest eBook Central interface in due course (this interface is to replace the current interfaces for both Ebrary and EBL). We will still run a (smaller) patron-driven profile of EBL eBooks to cover material not available in Academic Complete but which is still needed. Use stats will help to inform this and we’ll also consider outright purchase options. We are able to run a report of everything that we have manually added to our patron-driven profile. There’s around 150 of these titles. In most cases these will be in response to recommendations during 2015 where we have offered access in the form of short term loans instead of outright purchases. We can compare with Academic Complete content and add back specific titles not covered in Academic Complete. At any stage specific titles can be added back into our patron-driven profile quickly and easily if it turns out we’ve cut something from our profile that was needed. Even though our profile will be much smaller, the ability for us to offer patron-driven access continues to be an important tool in our purchasing repertoire as an alternate “just in time” option to outright purchase.
Training
ProQuest are offering training for us as part of the staff development programme (February 2nd 9:30am) and it would be good to use this time for them to show us Academic Complete as well as the new interface.
Questions
Please contact me tim.stedman@canterbury.ac.nz and I’m very happy to answer any questions.