by Byron Russell, Head of ingentaconnect
Ingenta
Library Bulletin, Summer 2015
The British Library and Ingenta have formed a partnership which will see 5,400 new journal and book titles hosted on the ingentaconnect platform this July – an increase of over 40% in content. With millions of end users in more than 170 counties already digesting scholarly content via ingentaconnect, the agreement offers the British Library a new channel for reaching key international audiences. Book and journal content from an assortment of 15 academic publishers, including Oxford University Press, Elsevier Science, Nature Publishing Group, the IEEE and the Royal Society of Chemistry, will now be available on ingentaconnect as part of the collaboration.
We interviewed Sam Tillett, Project and Service Manager at the British Library, commented: “We are very pleased to be collaborating with Ingenta and to roll out our Document Supply Service book and journal content onto the ingentaconnect platform. Until now our service has been accessible to 148 UK-based universities and institutions, and this deal helps to bring our content to a global stage. We look forward to monitoring the impact ingentaconnect makes and working closely with Ingenta to ensure this is a success.”
Can you tell us briefly about the British Library Document Supply Service’s history?
ST: We’ve been running a service from Boston Spa since 1961; we were set up to be an STM information centre in the middle of the UK. Over the past fifty years we’ve moved from photocopies sent out by post through to faxes and now, of course, to digital.
There will be a huge volume of content that will now be available via ingentaconnect as well as via the BL DSS– over 4000 new titles, including more than 2000 just from Elsevier / Elsevier Science. In what format is the content delivered, and is there any DRM in the delivered material?
ST: The content will be delivered as born-digital PDFs directly supplied to us by the publisher. There will be a light DRM wrapper around it from Adobe digital editions. It just requires a single registration and password on the British Library On Demand website.
What helped you decide on the partnership with ingentaconnect?
ST: We provide access to content, so naturally we want to work with the interfaces our customers use, and ingentaconnect is a great product with a great interface. Our aim is to make content as widely available as possible, and the partnership with ingentaconnect will really help with this.
What do you feel will be the major benefits to the British Library’s publishing partners?
ST: For them it will be another route to market which usefully fits in with actual users’ workflows. It’ll mean more revenue for publishers, and much greater exposure too.
According to a member of our Library Advisory Board, a major challenge to librarians is discoverability. How will the association between the British Library and ingentaconnect help in this regard?
ST: We provide metadata, and while this will aid discoverability it is just as much about accessibility. We see this partnership as a means to provide libraries and end users with access to a broad range of content as a seamless workflow.
What future developments might there be in terms of the range of content delivered via the new service?
ST: We’re going to be including more abstracts, but most importantly our goal is to bring more publishers on to the service and increase the range of content that’s available.