Cowles Briefing
Get It Now – Cowles Library Launches New Access Pilot Initiative
Library users can now access journal articles on-demand through the Get It Now Service. A pilot program, Get It Now, is available from within SuperSearch as well as from many Drake-subscribed databases. Get It Now delivers requested articles via email, usually within 8 hours. Cowles Library covers the cost of the article.
Example Get It Now request screen
Part of a Bigger Picture
Academic libraries – including Drake – are in the midst of an access revolution. The future is unfolding rapidly as a landscape populated with a multitude of avenues to reach out and get scholarly content. The opportunity and potential benefit is a much broader and deeper availability of resources, and empowering the user to select their own content; but the accompanying challenges are many: user acceptance, platform stability, technical requirements, and of course cost and value.
In the case of the Get It Now pilot, the articles of only one publisher – Elsevier – will be initially available. Cowles Library will retain full subscriptions to a handful of Elsevier journals, but will shift access and the cost of access to the entire Elsevier journal publishing output (several thousand titles) through the Get It Now service.
Professor Teri Koch, Coordinator of Collections provided overall leadership and projection direction. Andrew Welch, Librarian for Discovery Services, was instrumental in developing the technical implementation of this pilot and worked closely with two major knowledge vendors – the Copyright Clearance Center and EBSCO – to bring the service to Drake. As was the case with SuperSearch, the Cowles Library faculty and staff have done some pioneering work in putting together this service. For additional background on the role of on-demand access, see this recent article: http://chronicle.com/article/Reader-Choice-Not-Vendor/125275/
