Library & Archives

The Library and Archives wishes to inform the Laurentian community of the information resource license non-renewals and book purchasing reductions to occur within the current 2020-2021 fiscal year. These licensing and purchasing reductions are required in order to respond to a combination of a reduced library acquisitions budget allocation and of increased costs, such as annual price inflation and some higher systems costs.

The licenses that will not be renewed this year were identified with consideration of various factors. For example, full-text content was privileged over bibliography, primary literature over review literature, or relatively lower cost/use over relatively higher. In some cases, the decision was made because a particular license was up for renewal this year, and our savings target had to be met. Nevertheless, we focussed on resources of secondary importance among those supporting a discipline.  Most of the licenses that will not be renewed are due to expire by the end of 2020; this December notice of the non-renewals is a result of our having worked hard to achieve savings elsewhere in order to keep the non-renewals list as short as possible.

We understand that the non-renewal of some of the licenses may be inconvenient for the work of some. That said, we are proud of our new academic search tool Omni and some coming improvements in our inter-library loan and document delivery services. We are pleased to note that the inter-library loan of physical books will recommence at most Ontario university libraries, including at Laurentian, in late February.

Licenses that will not be renewed:

• Annual Reviews journal suite - July 31, 2020
• Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts bibliographic database - March 31, 2021
• ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) journal suite - July 31, 2020
• Business Source Complete (EBSCO) full-text database - Dec 31, 2020
• Cell Press (Elsevier) journal suite - November 30, 2020
• Computing Reviews (Association for Computing Machinery) full-text database - May 15, 2020
• eHRAF Archaeology full-text database - December 31, 2020
• eHRAF World Cultures full-text database - December 31, 2020
• Jazz Music Library (ProQuest) music streaming service - August 31, 2020
• PhilPapers bibliographic database - July 31, 2020
• PsycBOOKS (American Psychological Association) full-text database - March 31, 2021
• Springer eBooks (the 2021 purchase offering) - Dec 31, 2020
• Certain individual-title journal subscriptions - varies but mostly Dec 31, 2020

We should be able to maintain our individual-title book purchasing to at least 90% of last year’s level.

If you have concerns or questions with respect to the information resources that will not be renewed or purchased this year, please contact the liaison librarian for your department or school or the University Librarian.

We wish all members of the Laurentian community a pleasant and safe holiday period and we look forward to continuing to work with you in 2021.