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Library Services for Alumni at King’s College London

Alumni Library Forum, Cass Business SchoolWednesday 11th December 2013Anna Franca, Subscriptions & Access Manager

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King’s College and alumni

• Large multidisciplinary research-led university based in London founded in 1829

• Hundreds of notable and prominent alumni include Nobel laureates, politicians, writers, musicians, academics

• Florence Nightingale, Virginia Woolf, Maurice Wilkins, Reverend Desmond Tutu

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Importance of alumni

• Alumni can be the best ambassadors for King’s• Can serve as advocates providing advice and

support to current and future students• Alumni as potential donors and source of fundraising

income• Completion of course is not the end but beginning of

a lifelong relationship

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• Range of services and benefits include an alumni email address, career support, events, discounted gym membership, travel & leisure discounts, In Touch (free alumni magazine)

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Library Services for alumni

• Eligible for library membership on completion of studies

• Free reference membership to all six King’s libraries• Borrowing privileges for annual charge of £60• Alumni can borrow up to 3 four week loan books• Walk-in access to electronic resources via a small

number of PCs• Continued access to RefWorks

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Eresource access for alumni

• King’s attracts large numbers of international students and many alumni are not based in the UK

• Traditional library service with walk-in access is not useful and even for UK based alumni may have limited value

• Pressure for increased alumni access to eresources from particular Schools

• Supporting alumni in pursuit of lifelong learning

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Setting up JSTOR access

• Decision to participate in the Alumni Access Pilot in June 2012

• Preparatory meetings with colleagues in Alumni Relations Team to discuss options

• Number of access methods to choose from• Agreed that “access token” method would work best

for King’s – placed behind password protected Alumni Online web pages

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Promotion and marketing

• Featured as a story on the main King’s College London web page

• Quarterly Alumni E Newsletter in June• Unprecedented numbers of new requests for Alumni

Online membership - over 700 in one day!• Features as a key benefit on King’s alumni web

pages• Usage statistics from JSTOR – over 14,000 accesses

in the first year

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JSTOR Accesses by Discipline

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Next steps and challenges

• Henry Stewart Talks – username and password• Request for access to wider range of resources,

particularly for the health schools• Investigative work carried out to identify publishers

that offer alumni access• Authentication – ezproxy or Shibboleth?• Support from IT department

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Key learning points

• Maintain good relations with the Alumni Relations Team and understand their needs

• Open dialogue with publishers/suppliers and try to help them to understand authentication needs

• Many stakeholders involved – Alumni Relations, IT, Library Services, publishers

• Despite challenges, JSTOR serves as use case of how eresource access for alumni can work

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Thank you!Any questions?

Contact me:

anna.franca@kcl.ac.uk