In January 2023, the UL’s evidence-based (EBA) scheme for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) titles with De Gruyter was renewed for another calendar year. This scheme provides access to a growing list of titles and each year we can select a group of titles from the EBA scheme to own permanently. See this blog post for more information about the renewal.
The EBA scheme for SSH titles has been run at Cambridge University Library since 2015. In 2016, the scheme was expanded to include Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) titles with the contribution of the Betty and Gordon Moore Library paying for the additional cost. In late 2022 the decision was made by STEMM librarians to no longer participate in the STM component of the EBA. This decision was based on usage statistics provided by De Gruyter, the same usage statistics that are used to make yearly purchase selections. This decision meant that 10,500 unowned STM title records had to be removed from the library catalogue.
The ebooks team set to task ensuring that only unowned title records were removed from the catalogue and that all the previously purchased STM title records were retained. Firstly, the purchased De Gruyter STM title records needed to be assigned to a new electronic collection in the library management system as this is the best way to identify and manage the records we wanted to keep. All ebook title records in iDiscover are attached to electronic collections, the collection name can be seen when selecting an ebook record on iDiscover in the text hyperlink after “Full text available at”
Title records had to be individually edited in our library management software, each record was moved from the unowned EBA collection pool (de Gruyter eBooks Complete) to the new collection, De Gruyter STEMM Ebooks Perpetual. We also edited the notes field of the records to remove any reference to the EBA scheme and we ensured that the link to the full text on the De Gruyter platform was working. Every title in the collection is automatically provided with the public note “Unlimited Concurrent Access”, this is set at the collection level as every De Gruyter ebook title is both unlimited access and DRM-free.
From 2016 to 2022, STM titles were selected annually for permanent purchase by STEMM librarians, so around 500 title records needed to be edited and moved over, to prevent accidental deletion. In early 2023, De Gruyter provided a list of STM EBA records to be deleted, making sure to remove the final selection of 139 titles for permanent purchase. Deleting the unowned records was a batch job process, and another smaller manual job was done to move those 139 titles from the EBA collection to the STEMM collection. There are now 652 title records attached to the De Gruyter STEMM Ebooks Perpetual collection. Below is a small sample of the varied titles that we hold as a result of participating in the STM EBA scheme for six years.
Emily Perdue (eBooks Library Assistant)
- 40 years of evolution : Darwin’s finches on Daphne Major Island
- Beautiful Geometry
- Climate in motion : science, empire, and the problem of scale
- Grundlagen der Elektrotechnik 2
- The Kingdom of Fungi
- Predicting the Unpredictable : The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction
- The Tiger and the Pangolin : Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China
- Unsolved Problems in Mathematical Systems and Control Theory
- When Galaxies Were Born : The Quest for Cosmic Dawn
ebooks@cambridge 