U. offers alumni free access to library electronic resources

The University library has started offering alumni free electronic access to the Scholarly Journal Archive, ProQuest National Newspapers Premier, ProQuest Research Library and ebrary Academic Complete since September.

Alumni were previously not allowed to access the University's electronic resources remotely. However, alumni who visit campus and come into Firestone or any of the campus branch libraries have access to all of the library's electronic resources.

The expanded service was recommended by the University library’s digital resources advisory group and unanimously approved by the library department head group, which consists of the head librarian, the deputy librarian and directors of five library departments.

Patricia Gaspari-Bridges, assistant University librarian from the library’s collection development department, said she had to reach out to vendors and publishers in order to make the electronic resources available. The library began looking into those electronic resources last year because of a number of alumni requests, she said. The University needed to obtain separate legal licensesfor alumni electronic access because the current University licenses the library negotiated only grant access to current faculty, staff and students.

Gaspari-Bridges explained that each electronic resource is provided by a different vendor and publisher, each of whom has their own license. Some vendors and publishers do not allow their resources to be offered to alumni at all, while some do it for free and some do upon payment of a fee.

A number of vendors did not make their resources available to alumni until recently, according to Gaspari-Bridges. JSTOR, for example, launched its Alumni Access program in January 2013. The participation fee is 10 percent of the institution's total annual access fee.

“It was only a matter of everything coming together to allow us to offer these resources,” Gaspari-Bridges said. “Princeton was looking for just the right mix of resources to offer our alumni.”

In addition to obtaining licenses for alumni, the library also worked with Office of Information Technology to make electronic resources available. For example, deputy university librarian Marvin Bielawski said that OIT had to make sure there were no duplicate netIDs across the alumni database and the main campus database.

M. Kathryn Taylor ’74, the Director of Alumni Affairs and Communications in the Office of Alumni Affairs, served as a tester for TigerNet Log-in and promoted the new resources to alumni through a monthly newsletter and website.

Taylor said the October alumni newsletter included a link to Firestone’s new online resources. The link received more than 500 hundred clicks in the first 10 days, and Taylor added that many, many more alumni have clicked through from a variety of resources since that initial period.

“I think it was a combination of responding to alumni requests as well as their own knowledge that these are excellent resources,” Taylor said. “On both sides, it’s a very happy combination.”