21 July 2004
UK Colleges Receive Free e-Reference Books “In Perpetuity”
An agreement signed between JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) and the publisher Thomson Gale will mean that every college in the UK will be able to gain access to the free content of twenty-one top electronic reference titles in perpetuity.
The titles included in the Gale Virtual Reference Library - including the Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, the Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations, the six-volume Gale Encyclopedia of Science, and many others – have been specially chosen by representatives of the FE community for their quality and their relevance to the curriculum.
JISC and Thomson Gale entered into negotiations over these titles because consultation had shown that while the FE community values e-books, there is still not a large and affordable enough collection of e-books available that are tailored to the needs of FE students and staff. These titles will at a stroke add more than 31,800 pages and many thousands of reference entries to colleges’ reference resources. The normal cost of the 21 titles in hard copy (representing a total of 63 volumes) is nearly £5,000, so that if all colleges in the UK were to subscribe to this deal, its value to the community could therefore be as much as £2m. An optional hosting fee of £65 per annum will be charged to each institution to access the books via Gale's servers.
Lorraine Estelle, JISC Collections Team Manager, said: “This is a wonderful resource for colleges – the very highest quality titles and all fully cross-searchable. We hope all colleges will take full advantage of this agreement.”
Jill Jones of Thomson Gale said: "We are delighted to collaborate with JISC in this unique initiative to support new learning opportunities. Now every student, teacher and librarian in the FE community can access primary reference material online, to support course work and projects. By supplying a range of e-books across many key FE disciplines, available both in the library and off campus, we hope to increase the accessibility of high quality information for all in the FE sector".
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