Overview
To support the research needs of more than 34,000 students and faculty, North Carolina State University Libraries offer a robust research collection of more than 4.6 million volumes, including 70,000 print and electronic serial titles. The NCSU Libraries use EBSCO's subscription services to manage publisher packages. Maria Collins, Head of Acquisitions & Discovery, manages the institution's serials and acquisitions department. Read her testimonial below.
EBSCO’s willingness to provide custom services offers additional incentive to outsource publisher package management.
EBSCO’s willingness to provide custom services offers additional incentive to outsource publisher package management.
Customer Testimonial
by Maria Collins, Head of Acquisitions & Discovery
The decision to utilize an agent for managing publisher packages at North Carolina State University (NCSU) was based on a variety of factors including the ease of administering package title lists. EBSCO facilitates the management of changes to titles as well as relationships across titles (i.e., title history and acquisition bundles).
Since NCSU has a history of collaborating with vendors to automate and streamline workflows, minimizing exceptions and specialized workflows is also important. The majority of our serial titles are within publisher packages, so having EBSCO assist with their management has helped us to realize an economy of scale. This in turn has enabled our staff to focus their energies on providing seamless access to our users and designing systems to support electronic resource management (ERM). In addition, as we have experimented with acquisitions data within our locally developed ERM, ESBCO has allowed us to link to subscription data housed within the EBSCONET portal. This kind of partnership benefits both parties by maximizing the efforts of each organization without duplication.
Furthermore, the consolidation of as many titles as possible with an agent allows for efficient management of the billing and renewal cycle. EBSCO has provided outstanding service by ensuring that the business terms of a package are maintained across the life of the deal, especially through E-Package Renewals on EBSCONET.
Finally, EBSCO has assisted with custom packages created through our local consortium and has created custom statuses to support the management of shared titles. EBSCO’s willingness to provide custom services offers additional incentive to outsource publisher package management.