The challenge

Jisc Collections makes it possible for the UK education and research community to afford access to otherwise costly academic publications. As electronic publications became more prevalent, libraries struggled to use existing systems to manage their growing catalogues of e-resources. A shared knowledge base of e-journals and e-books managed by Jisc would offer significant benefits and savings to libraries.

  • Save time maintaining and correcting information by using a shared, centrally maintained catalogue of titles, packages and licences
  • Manage a library’s subscriptions in one place
  • Share information on subscriptions, licences and resources with relevant teams, reducing the time spent dealing with individual queries
  • More seamless transfer of information between a library and the publishers and agents it deals with
  • Provide a better service to students, researchers and staff

What we delivered

We built the Knowledge Base+ (KB+) service from the ground up for Jisc, in partnership with Sero and the UK Higher Education library community.

The KB+ service has been a massive success to date. It is widely recognised as an excellent example of Jisc working in partnership with private sector suppliers to deliver high quality agile responsive solutions in a collaborative way.

Improvements are made in a cycle of continuous development and always in collaboration with the user community. In the overhaul of the user interface we worked with third party UX specialists to deliver a user experience which caters to novice and expert users alike.

KB+ supports libraries with a multitude of tasks.

  • Discover the titles and e-journals on offer by publishers
  • See what’s included in digital subscriptions and how they can be used
  • Track and plan ongoing access by understanding your long-term access rights and routes to digital content (licences)
  • Review and evaluate the value of subscriptions. Finances are tracked and the cost per use calculated. Usage statistics from the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) can be accessed
  • Access information about Jisc’s licence agreements with publishers in human and machine readable formats
  • Build licences from templates or from scratch
  • Compare the features of licences side by side to support decision making
  • Subscription tools help users track details of entitlements and journal coverage, manage renewals and compare different journal packages
  • Changes and additions are broadcast to users by the Jisc team

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