Collections Development

Collections Services is responsible for the disbursement of the University’s library acquisitions budget to provide access to research resources through purchase, subscription or the support of open access initiatives. A Collections Policy guides collection development and maintenance at UNB and provides a more fulsome description of our work.

UNB Libraries subscribe to the principles enunciated in the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) Policy Statement entitled “Freedom of Expression in Research Libraries” and the Canadian Library Association’s “Statement on Intellectual Freedom.”

Consortia

We are members of national and regional consortia, including The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and The Council of Atlantic University Libraries (CAUL), and work through them to secure favourable pricing and licensing terms for many of our purchased or subscribed resources, and to support the development of a sustainable open access model of scholarly communication. The values described in CRKN’s Licensing Principles guide this work.

Support for Open Access

As the scholarly communications landscape is evolving, CRKN has also negotiated ‘transformative agreements’ with traditional publishers to explore models that combine open access to resources with conventionally purchased or leased access. We have negotiated reductions in APC charges with several publishers through transformative agreements.

Other initiatives involve academic libraries working directly with (often university-based) publishers in “Direct to Open” (D2O) arrangements, to disseminate research outputs as open access by using acquisitions budgets to offset the costs of publication.

UNB Libraries also invite authors and researchers to comply with open access mandates by depositing their works in UNB’s institutional repository, UNB Scholar or data repository, UNB Dataverse.

More information on support for open access is available from Mike Nason, Scholarly Communications Librarian.

Licensing

Books, journals, streamed media and other formats are licensed as electronic resources for scholarly and educational (not commercial) use by the UNB and STU communities. These licenses define the limits that may be placed on:

• the number of simultaneous users,
• the provision of access to off-campus users
• permissible use within e-Reserves, D2L Brightspace, inter-library loan, etc.
• perpetual access
• text and data mining of content
• availability of usage data
• additions to and withdrawal of content

It is important that all users comply with the scholarly and educational use restrictions on UNB Library’s e-Resources, as failure to do so imperils access for all users and is a contravention of UNB’s Acceptable Use of Information and Communication Technologies. Students who are also employees, interns, or in a work-study placement or similar program are obliged to use licensed library resources for their individual scholarly use only.

Questions about specific licenses should be directed to Electronic Licensing Librarian Linda Roulston .

Acquisitions

Materials are purchased or subscribed to throughout the year, with a hiatus in purchasing during the late spring when the fiscal year ends. We generally require discretionary spending requests to be submitted by faculties and departments by January 31 each year.

Prospective additions to the collection are assessed by a Collections committee and liaison librarians, often in consultation with faculty members.

Cataloguing

UNB Libraries’ catalogue is part of OCLC WorldCat Discovery, which enables both local and worldwide resource discovery. The catalogue lists all holdings at UNB Libraries, regardless of format, including databases and most journal and newspaper titles. Print materials are organized using the Library of Congress cataloguing system. While the catalogue itself is open to all, access to the full text of linked licensed resources requires a UNB or STU-assigned login and password.

Questions about using the catalogue should be directed to our Ask Us service. Merle Steeves is the Head of Technical Services, which oversees cataloguing activities.

Gifts

UNB Libraries are grateful for donors’ gifts of money and in-kind. Our current Gifts Policy outlines our current collection goals and procedures for donating.

Collection evaluation

UNB Libraries’ collection is under continual development as we allocate UNB’s acquisitions funding to maintain an up-to-date, accurate, and relevant collection that reflects the interests of our community. We employ various tools to help focus resources appropriately, including:

• UNB Senate Curriculum Committee reports
• UNB Academic Planning reports
• Liaison Librarians’ observations
• Feedback from faculties and departments
• COUNTER usage data
• Cost-per-use calculations
• Publishers’ turn-away data
• Inter-library loan requests
• Print circulation statistics
• Stacks analysis

The Library’s Collection Analysis and Bibliometrics librarian is Julie Morris.

Working with Faculties and Departments

Each faculty/department is assigned a liaison librarian to oversee the unit’s discretionary portion of the acquisitions budget and to advise on best use of central funding to support teaching and research in that area. Liaison librarians also provide library instruction and research support to students and faculty members.

Faculties and departments are encouraged to identify for the Library a representative who can work with the liaison librarian to maintain a robust collection.

For more information or to discuss any aspect of UNB Libraries’ collections services, please contact Joanne Smyth, Director, Collections Strategy and Scholarly Communication.

If you would like to suggest a title, please use our Purchase Suggestion webform to do so.