Knowledge Base+
A shared community service to help UK academic libraries manage their electronic resources more efficiently.
Providing e-resources represents significant investment of time and effort from acquisition to licensing and management. Libraries are rightly concerned over duplicated and wasted effort across the institution in managing these processes.
Moreover, librarians, library system vendors and others in the supply chain often complain about the difficulty of accessing reliable and accurate information for the knowledge bases that underpin so many library systems and services. The answers should be there, but finding them can be challenging.
As a shared service, KB+ saves librarians time and effort, by moving a number of these functions to the national level, and by facilitating more effective management of the information.
Benefits for library and information professionals
Specifically designed to meet the needs of today’s library and information professionals, the service enables you to:
- Save time maintaining and correcting information when you use the automatically updated, accurate title lists we make available
- Benchmark your own usage and data against other similar libraries to help spot trends and predict user behaviour
- Manage your subscriptions in one place, right down to the detail of tracking dates and formats
- Automatically share key information on subscriptions, licences and resources with relevant teams in your organisation, cutting down the time you have to deal directly with multiple individual queries
- Enjoy more seamless transfer of information between your organisation and the publishers and agents you deal with
- Use the information to provide a better service to students, researchers and staff, whether it’s giving them more access to previously procured journals, or making more strategic decisions about renewals
- Export your subscription data on various link resolvers formats, so staff don’t need to duplicate work
- Identify overlapping subscriptions and alternative packages that might include a specific title
Through access to this reliable and accurate data, we can support libraries in their analysis and evaluation of e-resources, increasing confidence in procurement decisions. Importantly this helps libraries demonstrate the value of their resources to the wider institution.
What are the benefits to my organisation?
- Reap savings in time and money, and enable your staff to concentrate on data analysis rather than data collation
- More confident decision-making, based on standardised and trustworthy data
- Join the conversation to help UK-wide consortia such as Jisc to secure the best possible resources for learning and research providers, based on empirical evidence on usage and trends
Get started
If you are interested in signing up to KB+, please contact knowledgebaseplus@jisc.ac.uk and we’ll discuss it with you directly.