CLI Libraries Accelerate Investment in eBooks

With two recent large purchases of titles from scientific publishers Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell, the CIC libraries continue to escalate their commitment to eBooks.

The Wiley-Blackwell and Elsevier eBook purchases provide users around-the-clock, continuous access to content and expand the available content beyond what an individual library might be able to acquire without consortial discounting.

The Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell purchases were made as part of the large-scale acquisition program, a two-year-old program in which the CIC libraries contribute to a central pool of funds for strategic purchases of content.

CIC faculty, staff and students will have online access to approximately 2200 Wiley-Blackwell titles covering the 2008 and 2009 publishing years, while the Elsevier purchase includes 1500 books from 2008-2010. Libraries will have the option to continue buying 2010 titles from Wiley-Blackwell at a deeply discounted purchase price.

Although the CIC libraries have invested in eBooks for more than a decade, today there is more opportunity to provide current books online to users across all disciplines. User demand, new uses of physical library space, and the availability of eBooks from many publishers will allow libraries to continue to build their virtual collections going forward.

The CIC libraries are building on a successful purchase of 2005-2010 eBooks from the publisher Springer, for which there were more than a million downloads in 2009.

Other previous purchases include Eighteenth Century Collections Online II (Gale); The Sixties (Alexander Street Press); and Literature Criticism Online Archive (Gale).