SECTION V: SELECTION CRITERIA

Academic staff may recommend new titles for subscription which will be evaluated for suitability together with the librarian, the school’s program chairperson and Director of Academic Affairs. Library and academic staff evaluates possible online database acquisitions by considering, but not limiting themselves to the following criteria: 

• Appropriateness for the entire collection, including filling gaps in the print collection (Extent of duplication)
• Authoritativeness
• Scope or Comprehensiveness
• Reputation of online database
• Currency of information
• Access to archives/back files
• Price
• Relevance to the curriculum
• Student and Staff needs and requests
• Published reviews
• Downloading of data
• Availability of Full Text in PDF or/and HTML
• Accessibility
• System and infrastructure requirements
• Vendor/Service support
• Past usage statistics
• User-friendliness of interface and search tools such as proximity searching, Boolean operators, thesaurus, truncation, document as query search (e.g. “find me more like this”) etc.