JISC eCollections – on the road with Scott Gibbens
In June and July, Scott Gibbens, our service representative, joined the rest of the JISC Collections team on their annual roadshow. Here is what he had to say….
I recently attended the series of JISC Collections Roadshows running in June and July across the UK, updating the audience on the progress of JISC eCollections over the past year.
One of the features of the JISC eCollections service is that there is an Advisory Board for each platform. Each Advisory Board includes academic and library staff. These experts, representing their community, decide the development priorities of each platform and in the presentation I gave, you can see some of whats planned for the platforms over the comming months.
The JISC Historic Books platform has had the most changes since the last roadshow and the slides show how the platform has evolved over those 12 months, based on user feedback. The slides then finish showing the platform developments planned for JISC Historic Books which should become available in late summer 2012.
The presentation finished with the offer of a 50% discount on subscriptions for the next year (August 2012 – July 2012).
Some of the questions i received were as follows:
Q: Is JISC eCollections available via Research Discover Services such as Summon, Primo and Ebsco?
A: We are working with these providers, and have for example, provided them all with Kbart lists of the journals we hold. We hope to integrate our resources better over the coming year.
Q: MARC records – are they available for the JISC Historic Books (JHB)?
A: Not yet, but we are working with the British Library and English Short Title Catalogue to make these records available. The JHB service is open URL compliant with a unique link to each book.
Q: Are there any usage statistics available?
Yes. Edina already supply the JISC MediaHub statistics. Statistics from MIMAS for JISC Journal Archives and JISC Historic Books will be available in September.