About

JISC and JISC Collections have invested in national licences for journal, historic book and multimedia archives on behalf of all UK higher and further education institutions.

Currently, member institutions access this content on a range of different platforms, many of which are managed by commercial providers. Some of these providers charge institutions annual fees to access the content; JISC Collections has limited control over these fees and is also reliant on the commercial providers to continue to host the content. Furthermore, accessing content across a multitude of publishers’ platforms can be confusing for users, and presents additional administrative effort for librarians.

The JISC eCollections service has been developed by the community, for the community, to protect and preserve existing investments.

It consolidates and hosts content purchased on behalf of JISC Collections members, enabling them to offer a world-class collection that ensures users’ broadest information needs are well met.

The service provides a sustainable, value for money alternative to accessing licensed content on publisher platforms.

The JISC eCollections service currently comprises three platforms:

• JISC Journal Archives
  More than 3.75 million articles from major publishers and societies
• JISC Historic Books
  The full text of over 350,000 books published in Great Britain from 1475–1900, including over 65,000 19th century books
• JISC MediaHub
  Over 750,000 multimedia items, including video, images and sound collections

Community management: as part of the academic community, JISC Collections will solicit service feedback and work with the JISC eCollections advisory boards to develop, expand and preserve the service in line with the long-term expectations and needs of members.

For the long term: with your help, JISC eCollections can become self-sustaining, thereby guaranteeing lasting availability for the community.

Value for money: institutions will pay a single service fee to support the cost of hosting and maintaining all the platforms. Service fees for 2011, 2012 and 2013 have been set (see back page) and depend on institution type and JISC band.

Simple, integrated interfaces: each platform will provide consistency and cross searching across multiple sources, making it easier for users to find and use valuable content.

Consistent terms of use: the content on each platform is available under a single sub-licence with terms that ensure it can be fully used and embedded in teaching, learning and research

Full administrative feature set: including UK Access Management Federation, COUNTER statistics and inbound OpenURL linking for text content, and training support.