You said
“Buy more ebooks.”
We did:
In 2018, we added over 30,000 ebooks to the collection.
We did this is a number of ways.
- For every book order received, we check for the availability of an ebook on a suitable model (e.g. we avoid titles that only allow a single concurrent user) and at a cost within our budget. If we can find them, we’ll buy them.
- We have existing agreements in place with key publishers – Springer, OUP and Elsevier for access to significant amounts of their ebook output – these titles are available for use without restriction (other than copyright).
- We have established new agreements with a broad range of publishers to allow us to procure titles from the publisher platforms on a title-by-title basis rather than in expensive packages. These titles also have no restriction on use.
- In 2018, we completed a ‘demand-driven’ procurement exercise – we loaded several thousand ebooks to the collection and those that you used were the ones that we purchased. This was a success and we will be doing similar things in the future.
We continue to subscribe to ebook databases such as Academic Complete, which provide access to tens of thousands of ebooks, again without restriction on use.
In total, we now provide access to over 240,000 ebook titles and the collection continues to grow.
All of our ebooks are linked from the Library catalogue.