Canada’s University of British Columbia Library Adopts Fully Hosted, Integrated Services from Serials Solutions
Nov. 8, 2010 – Seattle – Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, announced today that the University of British Columbia Library has adopted its Summon™ web-scale discovery service, 360 Resource Manager and 360 Counter services.
The University of British Columbia (UBC) educates a student population of more than 50,000 and holds an international reputation for excellence in advanced research and learning. It has major campuses in Vancouver and Kelowna. UBC Library has 21 branches and divisions, including on- and off-campus locations. The UBC Library’s collections are large and diverse, including more than six million volumes, 5.3 million microforms, more than 846,000 maps, audio, video and graphic materials, and more than 97,000 serial titles.
“We’re tremendously excited about the adoption of these services from Serials Solutions,” said Rue Ramirez, Associate University Librarian, Library Systems & Information Technology with UBC. “The Summon service will significantly change the way our library users search and find material in our vast collection. Our researchers have long sought a comprehensive discovery tool that delivers a depth of search that they simply could not achieve before. And, Summon integrates well with the 360 Core service already in place, which will be extremely helpful to our librarians – improving their ability to make decisions and access key information.”
UBC Library, a leading library in North America, selected the Summon™ service as it enables a familiar web-searching experience of the full breadth of content found in the library’s collections – from books and videos to e-resources – from a single, unified index. Its software as a service (SaaS) model means that the university does not need to invest in and maintain additional local hardware resources. The six-to eight-week implementation plan for the Summon™ service was also instrumental in helping UBC Library roll out this valuable new resource to its research community in a timely manner.
With 360 Resource Manager, UBC librarians will be able to more efficiently manage the entire lifecycle of e-resources. All the information about licenses, subscription status and renewal dates will be integrated with the authoritative Serials Solutions KnowledgeWorks knowledgebase. The benefit to UBC librarians is that all the information will be in one place, helping to improve the librarians’ workflow by mitigating the need to check multiple databases or filing cabinets for subscription contracts and other information.
The selection of the integrated 360 Counter service was made to help UBC librarians better assess their collection to make better decisions and reduce costs. Ramirez continued, “In tough economic times, we need to take a critical look at our expenditures and optimize our collection based on usage. 360 Counter lets us do this. We will now have an easy and efficient way to tell which e-resources are most popular in our library.”
“We are delighted that such a well-respected institution as the University of British Columbia has embraced Summon, 360 Resource Manager and 360 Counter with such enthusiasm,” said Mike Buschman, senior product manager for the Summon service with Serials Solutions. “It was clear from our discussions with librarians at UBC that they needed a web-hosted solution providing a single index with comprehensive coverage of their electronic resources. With these requirements, Summon and our other services were a natural choice.”
Other Western Canadian colleges and universities subscribing to the Summon™ service include the University of Victoria, Royal Roads University, Vancouver Island University and Simon Fraser University, as well as the University of Calgary and the University of Manitoba. Several other institutions have moved away from competitive systems in favor of the fully hosted, integrated and interoperable Serials Solutions’ services.
About the University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia is one of Canada’s largest and most prestigious public research and teaching institutions, and one of only two Canadian institutions to be consistently ranked among the world’s 40 best universities. Surrounded by the beauty of the Canadian West, it is a place that inspires bold, new ways of thinking that have helped make it a national leader in areas as diverse as community service-learning, sustainability and research commercialization. Located in the Pacific Rim gateway of Vancouver, one of the world’s great cities, and in the Interior city of Kelowna, it offers more than 50,000 students a range of innovative programs in the arts, sciences, medicine, law, commerce and other faculties. UBC attracts more than $450 million per year in research funding from government, non-profit organizations and industry through 7,000 grants.
About Serials Solutions
Founded by a librarian for librarians in 2000, Serials Solutions® is the global leader in E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) that serves more than 3,000 libraries of all sizes and types. Serials Solutions’ comprehensive suite of discovery tools and management services helps improve access to and use of collections, eases librarian workloads and ultimately reduces operating costs. Solutions include: 360, the only complete and integrated e-resource access and management solution; KnowledgeWorks, the authoritative e-resource knowledgebase and foundation for Serials Solutions 360; Ulrich’s™, the world’s most authoritative source of bibliographic and publisher information for serials and the most comprehensive source of print and electronic serials data available; AquaBrowser®, a discovery layer that makes navigation more accessible; and most recently the Summon™ web-scale discovery service, a world-class tool that provides instant access to the full breadth of the library’s collection through a single search.
Serials Solutions is a business unit of ProQuest LLC.