ProQuest provides valuable Title Matching Service to University of Leicester

Over the summer, University of Leicester in the UK had a project reviewing their short-term loan (high demand titles) collection with a view to disbanding this as a separate collection and re-using the space for study areas.  

Joanne Dunham from the University said, “We wanted to see for how many of the titles there was an ebook available. The Title Matching Fast (TMF) service from ProQuest ebooks businesses, ebrary and EBL, seemed an excellent and quick way to achieve this. Due to their being high-demand books, we were looking for multi-user titles and ended up purchasing a mixture of multi-user purchase option (MUPO) and Three-User Purchase Option (3UPO) from ebrary and non-linear lending copies from EBL." This analysis resulted in the university purchasing over 330 titles of the 2400 print titles in the collection.

ProQuest’s ebrary and EBL TMF service helps ebooks customers to accurately and quickly match print and electronic books ISBNs to various collections within their ebrary and EBL products.  It is a complete assessment service which provides three key elements: data cleaning, data matching and a detailed reporting output, which recommends the most efficient and inexpensive options based on the customer’s own data.

Already using ProQuest’s ebrary Academic Complete™ which has high use, it was a logical next step for Leicester to add these high -demand titles to this collection along with our first titles from the EBL collections. Joanne states that at this stage, “We have also used TMF to match our high use items in the main collections. This is a much longer project but has provided some interesting results. TMF has been an excellent way to map our collection, or part of it to what’s currently available as an ebook on the ebrary/EBL platforms and has saved days of work checking catalogs and book suppliers for the same information.”

One of the key functions of TMF is the time it saves staff and it is designed to meet the needs of the individual university. As is the case for many institutions, they are required to cut down on the areas that are used to house books to enable more study room for students, thus allowing time for support of larger projects. Joanne goes on to say, “All the de-duplication work was done for us and we ended up with a set of ebooks that enabled us to, in this case, move the print to normal loan and disband our dedicated short loan collection creating more study spaces in the library.”