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 realize 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 faculty research. This way I can set up alerts on their 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)