Selecting resources for Medicine, Nursing and
Allied Subjects:
Factors to Consider
Arlene Healy
Sub-Librarian, Electronic
Resources
Trinity College Library Dublin
Selection Criteria : Publishers with similar content
• Quality of content and relevance to
research or education
• Compliance with the terms and conditions
laid out in a ‘Model Licence’
• Compliance with industry information
standards
• Price
• Value for money
• Functionality & Search Interface
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Functionality & Search Interface
– Basic and advanced search
– Limiters
– Support of Boolean logic, truncation, wild cards
etc.
– Spell checking, ‘did you mean’ function
– Controlled vocabulary (browsed alphabetically
or graphically using hierarchical tress), for e.g.
MeSH
– Searchable fields
– Browsing options (for e.g. by subject, review
type, intervention strategy)
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Functionality & Search Interface
– Results navigation
• Modifiable results display (select fields to display)
• Sorting (relevance ranking, chronological, by topic )
• Option to refine/modify search results
– Interface usability
• Structure and design
• Breadcrumb trails
• Tutorials
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Selection Criteria: Unique content
• Strategic assessment
• Business assessment (including business
and financial models)
• Licensing evaluation
• Benefits assessments
Strategic Assessment
• Evaluating content in light of an institution’s
strategies and policies for research and education
• Ask the following questions:
– Does the content have the potential to enable efficient
research?
– Will it integrate with research work flows?
– Will online access to the content enable research that
would be difficult or impossible in the physical world?
– Will online access to the content support education? For
e.g. making the relevant content available at any time
or place, enable learner experiences that would not
otherwise be possible
Business Assessment: Price
• Electronic journals – bundled deals (‘Big Deal’
– High-use and low-use journal titles from a single
publisher are bundled together
– Difficult to compare bundled deals
– Typically the publisher charges the library for the titles
subscribed to historically + an e-access fee for the full or
aggregated digital collection
– Licence terms prohibit libraries from cancelling the
historic print spend
– The ‘Big Deal’ provides library users with a huge corpus
of material
– Studies show usage is high and good value for money is
provided
– In the area of STM scholarly publishing it is estimated
that there are 1.5 billion full-text downloads globally and
the average cost per articles is less than £2/€2.22
Price
– ‘Big Deal’ – high cost means library budgets
are constrained
– No flexibility for purchasing new digital content
– Niche or specialist journals could be squeezed
out
– Problem exacerbated by journal price inflation
– 7.6% Vs Retail Price Index at 3.3%
– Can this continue with the global economic
downturn?
– Other option is to retreat from the ‘Big Deal’
and subscribe only to titles required
– Pay more per title but only pay for what is
needed
– Access to subscribed titles possibly provided by
subscription agents through platforms such as
SwetsWise or Ebscohost
Price
• Subscription prices for databases and digital
datasets are rarely published
• It can be difficult to discover exactly what
content is included in a database and to compare
one publisher’s offer with another
• Essential to obtain and compare title lists covered
by the major bibliographic databases
• Few benchmarks available and final price
depends on the skill of library negotiators or
consortia (Confidentiality clauses in licence
agreements)
Measuring quality and value
• Impact factor of journals
– A measure of prestige but not a perfect form of quality
measurement
• Usage Statistics
– Low usage can indicate low value
– Resource could be used intensively in a more specialist
research area
– Frequency of publication impacts on usage
• Cost per download/search
– Compare costs across resources, compare with other
known costs, for e.g. ILL costs
• COUNTER code of practice for E-journals,
Databases and E-books
Business assessment: Financial models
• Lease only (e.g. Academic Search Premier,
Wilson Omnifile)
– Typically applies to large collections of
aggregated full text, images or datasets
– Can provide low cost access to a large corpus
of highly used material
– All subscribed content lost if a subscription is
cancelled
– Embargos
Financial Models
• Lease with archival rights (e.g.
ScienceDirect, Wiley/Blackwell)
– Predominant model for journal content
– Licence grants perpetual rights to subscribed
content (usually only to ‘subscribed titles’)
– Ongoing access may involve payment of an
‘access fee’
– Archiving - trusted third party repositories
PORTICO, LOCKSS (untested)
Financial Models
• Outright Purchase
– Model offered for static digital archives or for
e-books collections
– A one-off capital purchase secures content in
perpetuity
– Licence terms allow purchaser to take the data
for local hosting
Licensing Evaluation
• Overall value greatly depends on the terms and
conditions of the licence.
• The licence must allow the institution to fully
exploit the resource
• Benefits of a Model Licence
• Most important tenets (sample)
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‘authorised users’
‘Walk-in users’
Off campus access
Extracts of the resource may be used in teaching and
learning materials (electronic or print) and incorporated
into academic works (electronic or print)
– Archival rights (where relevant)
Compliance with information environment standards
• Open URL linking, Federated Search Engine
• Compliance with COUNTER-compliant usage
statistics
• Authentication method
– IP address, Shibboleth, username & password, Ezproxy
• Integration with Bibliographic Management
Software – EndNote, Refworks
• Compliance with W3C standards for accessibility
Benefits Assessments
• Essential to continually review the costeffectiveness and value of subscribed
content.
• Benefits assessment checklist
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Usage statistics
Cost per download
Business case justification and affordability
Publisher/vendor improving value for money
through improved or additional content or
through the provision of more generous
licensing terms and conditions
Benefits Assessments
• Future plans for development and
enhancements to functionality
• Robustness of service
• Does the resource continue to meet user
needs (user needs, surveys)
• Ongoing relevance to research, teaching
and learning
E-books
• Availability of front list material,
publishers covered
• No. of concurrent users
• Purchasing Model – outright purchase,
lease
• MARC Records
• Mobile devices and e-readers
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