University Campus Suffolk improves their management systems with ProQuest Intota™
University Campus Suffolk (UCS) in the United Kingdom is a new higher education institution, validated by the University of East Anglia and the University of Essex, and is situated across five sites with a central hub in Ipswich. The University has nearly 5,000 students and offers a portfolio of courses within the Faculty of Arts, Business and Applied Social Science, and the Faculty of Health and Science.
Integrated workflows are key for UCS, so they approached ProQuest to help with a system that would work together with their ebooks collection. The new Intota™ library services platform was the perfect solution for UCS, who are keen to use the latest library technology.
Ellen Buck, Head of Learning Services at UCS stated that, “UCS now has a well-rounded e-resource collection, and we need to make sure it stays relevant, accessible, and affordable. By introducing Summon and 360 Link a couple of years ago, we dramatically increased accessibility and usage, but monitoring the actual usage and cost-per-use of individual resources (and even being able to make evidence-based decisions on that data) has involved hours of work, not to mention various linked spreadsheets. The introduction of Intota will, we hope, make all of this so much more efficient. Now our Academic Liaison Librarians will be able to build subject specific collections, provide more complete collection spend figures to their departments and faculties, and use this data to promote any resources that are not being used as well as they should be. Another one of the tools we are particularly looking forward to using is the overlap tool – not just to compare title lists within subscribed databases, but also to see where we could weed print book holdings – and replace with ebooks through a loan or purchase model. We are just starting our training in Intota now, but the world of eResource management is looking a lot more exciting.”
Intota provides the most advanced management system, focusing on the patron experience, and recognizing the ultimate goal of a library’s management activities is to support user discovery of content and the ability to access it seamlessly.
Intota eliminates inefficient workflows around the management of these resources, allowing staff to focus on more important activities. The integrated platform streamlines the entire e-resource lifecycle, including evaluation, acquisition, assessment, and renewal. Resources acquired through Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA) are seamlessly updated within Intota’s discovery and assessment modules. Intota greatly enhances the discoverability and access to content for users while enabling librarians to perform detailed collection assessment across print and electronic holdings.
In addition to the management of their collections, the university was looking to increase the content they provide the students. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses UK and Ireland (PQDT UKI) was what they were looking for. Supporting the move for the institution to become more research oriented, the purchase of PQDT UKI provides the students and researchers with the most comprehensive records of doctoral theses from the UK and Ireland. The corpus of UK and Ireland dissertations and master’s theses in this product currently comprises over half a million records, with some additional 15,000 citations added annually.
Ellen Buck states that, “As UCS has grown as an institution, so we have needed to grow our e-resource portfolio. Through some close working with our ProQuest rep, Jess Porter, we have been able to review our database collection to build a strong core collection, provided primarily through ProQuest and EBSCO platforms, and then complement it with some more niche products through other providers. The latest addition to our collection is PQDT, which has filled a gap we had in being able to search for research conducted for higher degrees.”
Successfully hosting the 3rd Information Literacy and Summon Day in 2014, University Campus Suffolk has been using ProQuest’s Summon® Discovery Service since 2012, which they have used to help shape their information literacy teaching practices. UCS has great confidence in the ProQuest products, and the two newest acquisitions will deliver research and workflow solutions for both users and the staff in the library.