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[Editor's Note: Breaking news! The Team has recommended and the SUNY Council of Library Directors has affirmed a continuation of the SUNYConnect electronic resources with the following additions: Applied Science & Technology Full Text, Education Full Text, Energy & Power Source, Entrepreneurial Studies Source, Humanities Full Text, LGBT Life with Full Text, Social Sciences Full Text. More information to follow; the additional databases will be available as of July 1, 2012.]

A review of SUNYConnect electronic resources is currently underway. The SUNYConnect Electronic Resources Team has been meeting since December and is seeking to make an announcement of regarding new and/or continuing database resources right around press time.

You should know your rep. on the Team. Thanks to the Connie, Ed, Katie, Mohamed and Shafeek for their efforts and their service to SUNY. The campus sector reps have been receiving input from colleagues regarding the information needs of SUNYConnect in general and their campus type in particular. Requests and suggestions sent into the SUNYConnect Electronic Resources Coordinator have been put into the mix. And, wish lists from previous reviews and evaluations of databases have also been consulted and utilized.

Database vendors and publishers have been contacted. This list certainly includes the "big three" - EBSCO, Gale and ProQuest. The Team has requested and received a wide, varying set of price proposals from these three. The request and the proposals, of course, put a focus on multi-disciplinary full-text databases as well as other more subject-specific resources. Some additional, specific pricing requests that have been made by the Team include American History and Life, CINAHL with Full-text, SocIndex with Full Text (EBSCO); Times Digital Archive and Opposing Viewpoints (Gale); ABI/Inform, New York Times, Newstand with Gannett newspapers (ProQuest).

Each of these three vendors has made a presentation to the Team. Your SUNY colleagues have been reviewing these materials, the vendor proposals, and additional information. In addition, trial access to ProQuest is being utilized. (EBSCO, of course, is the current SUNYConnect database provider; Gale is the major provider of the NOVEL databases available from the New York State Library.)


Price proposals have also been requested and received for American Journal of Nursing, Annual Reviews, Compendex, GeoRef, Inspec, Journal of the American Medical Association, JSTOR and Lexis Nexis Academic.

The Team is seeking the suite of resources that provides the widest selection of needed databases, covering a large number of subject areas. This, while constrained by limited financial resources. A selection of databases from a number of different publishers and providers is desirable. The pricing models and tight budget can work to preclude this, however. As always, the goal is to economically provide basis database resources to SUNYConnect participants and then freeing up campus monies for more specialized resources.

An announcement from the Team is expected at any moment.