Our guidelines for 2016 purchasing has raised some questions about the role of GOBI alerts for newly published material.

The GOBI alerts that liaison librarians have set up are based on our “Slip plan” which we’ve set up with YBP.  The Slip plan will continue to operate behind the scenes profiling new material.  Anything that gets a match and that has an EBL version will automatically feed into our demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) pool.  This feed happens weekly. Anything that gets used will trigger a short-term loan purchase.  In line with recent changes to our DDA purchasing we will keep these titles in the patron-driven pool for the current year and rely on Academic Complete for access to content from previous years.

So do GOBI alerts serve any purpose in our “just in time” purchasing environment?  It really depends on the motivation for using them.  If they are used in response to a need to support current UC teaching, then fine.  If GOBI alerts are used for speculative purchasing, this doesn’t meet our criteria to ensure books needed for taught courses and research are available to students and staff.

So there are a couple of choices.  If you think the GOBI alerts for your subject are a useful current awareness tool for academics developing course content and are looking for newly published material to support current UC teaching then you might want to keep the alerts going.

Otherwise you can simply make your GOBI alerts inactive by changing the notification status in the GOBI alert itself:

Tim Stedman