Cancellation of ProQuest

As most of you are aware (and for those who are not, perhaps you'd like to sit down for this), the Library is cancelling its subscription to ProQuest. This means we will lose access in January 2009.

The decision to cancel ProQuest was not taken lightly and involved a lengthy evaluation process of three months where we interrogated the following:

· The number of unique titles in our three aggregator (Gale, EbscoHost, ProQuest) databases
· The % of overlapping titles present in all three aggregators
· The number of core subject specific journal titles present in each aggregator
· The usage of each aggregator in terms of full text downloads
· And finally the subscription price

The results of the evaluation were as follows, ProQuest had:
· the least amount of unique titles - an average of 11% for ABI Inform and Academic Research Library compared to Gale’s 26% and Ebsco’s 18%
· the highest percentage of overlap
· the lowest number of core subject specific journals
· the highest usage
· the second highest renewal price

I realise that the cancellation is not a popular one, and personally I am also quite depressed about it. But with the renewed focus of UJ on research and scholarly publications, it becomes more important to apply our (dwindling) financial resources to information sources that will give us the most for our money.

And one cannot argue with the fact that ProQuest had the least amount of unique titles which meant that we were paying almost R200 000 for only 11% of the database.

I am currently busy trying to obtain a title list of the unique titles in ABI Inform and Academic Research Library which will be applicable to your departmental research. This way I can set up alerts on the publisher’s web page for you, so that you can still receive the tables of content (in abstract form) and request relevant articles via Inter Library Loans.

The list is very long (700+) and to speed up the process, PLEASE send me the names of titles that you frequently use in ProQuest so that I can guide you to the other databases that also carry those titles.

Remember that I am also available to show you how the Gale and EbscoHost databases work. This way we’ll (hopefully) lessen the impact of the cancellation on your research output.

(The full evaluation report is available from me on request)

New journal additions in ProQuest

ProQuest has recently added new journals to their ABI/Inform Global collection, they are:

1) The Tax Lawyer (full text coverage from Spring 2007)
The Tax Lawyer, the USA’s premier, peer-reviewed tax law journal, is published quarterly as a service to its members by the American Bar Association Section of Taxation.The Tax Lawyer endeavors to provide scholarly articles by notable tax attorneys and professors, key reports by Section of Taxation committees and task forces, and student notes and comments on timely topics that the editorial board believes to be of professional interest to members of the Section and the tax profession.

2) Global Outlook Online (full text coverage from January 2008) published by The Bank of Nova Scotia. This journal covers the economic growth, conditions and statistics of Canada.

3) ICIS Chemical Business (full text coverage from October 2007) published by Reed Business Information, UK and covers the chemical industry news.

4) Telecommunications (full text coverage from July 2007) published by Horizon House, goes beyond superficial news headlines and plunges deeply into the business operations of service providers, the technologies they rely on and the applications they deploy to create competitive advantage.