Meg Quinn

Hello, everyone, and welcome to EBSCO's webinar, future proofing collections, the strategic value of perpetual access. I'm Meg Quinn, senior marketing manager at EBSCO, and soon I will introduce our speakers, Steph Moriarty and Courtney Peckham.

But before we get started, I want to go over a few housekeeping points. We are recording this webinar, and everyone is muted due to the high number of registrants. If you have a question, please use the q and a box.

We will monitor it throughout the presentation, but we will answer all questions at the end.

Okay. Let's get started. I'm joined today by Steph Moriarty, director of sales for Books at EBSCO, and Courtney Peckham, senior product manager at EBSCO.

Steph has been with EBSCO for fifteen years on the books team. She and her team oversee EBSCO eBooks, GOBI, Mosaic, and Flipster Digital magazines.

Courtney has been with EBSCO's research databases team for nineteen years. Over that time, she has worked with the entire suite of academic databases. Her current focus is on expanding EBSCO's archive portfolio.

We are excited to have both of you speaking today about the importance of perpetual access for library resources. And with that, I will turn it over to Steph.

Steph Moriarty

Thanks, Meg.

So perpetual access is vital to a library, and EBSCO eBooks fall in line with that.

Faculties, students, and patrons expect longer term and reliable access.

If a course is being taught throughout the year, so semester over semester, it's important to have access to that same assigned coursework throughout.

With accreditations, we have seen the need to have a stable collection to justify the investment into your resources, and it helps with continuity in a collection. And at EBSCO, we offer preservation, so you will always have access to perpetual content and long-term access for patrons in the very unlikely event that anything were to happen, we are prepared to continue to support.

So compared to other access models, perpetual access is customizable and guarantees consistency across the semesters.

If a more niche topic is needed, perpetual access to that content ensures longevity, and it also instills trust with the faculty to have reliable sore resources.

So as previously mentioned, perpetual access allows customization in the sense of you can pick and choose what you need and, more importantly, pick and choose what meets your budget.

Perpetual e-books have options for libraries of all shapes and sizes and patron needs. So our access models include one book, one user, one book, three simultaneous users, unlimited user access, as well as demand driven acquisition.

How we help here at EBSCO is we have two point eight million e-books to choose from, and our publication years go back as far as eighteen hundred, and we have some new additions already out for 2027 as well.

We do offer DRM free access on unlimited user access titles when available as well as an extensive foreign language selection.

With two point eight million titles, that is a lot to sift through if you don't know where to start. So here at EBSCO, we have a team of librarians, our collection development librarians, who their part of their job is to build curated bite sized collections. So we like to use these as starting points to begin browsing and pick what meet your needs.

Before closing on the EBSCO eBooks portion, I do want to take a minute to highlight the importance of accessibility.

With perpetual access, we provide upfront information if a book has passed accessibility compliance. And so you, as acquisitions, would know in advance if the book is going to meet compliance requirements at your institution.

ESCO is indeed WCAG 2.2 AA compliant. What does that mean? It means that we meet the European Accessibility Act and the upcoming ADA title two in the United States as well as other regulations throughout different countries.

And this slide just highlights ways that we make it easier for users, including text to speech. Users can view accessibility insights on their own, so they have insight into this book is going to meet their needs, and they can also adjust the text size and line spacing just to name a few things.

So with that, we will pass it over to Courtney Peckham who will review Magazine Archives.

Courtney Peckham

Thank you, Steph, and thank you, Meg. So, yes, I'm going to be talking about perpetual access in magazine archives. And first, I want to point out that perpetual access is really a collection strategy and not just a purchasing model.

It protects your investment. You're not paying for year after year to access the same material.

It eliminates the risk of losing critical title titles when budgets tighten or subscriptions change.

Magazine archives help to build long term research infrastructure, especially for the humanities and social sciences.

They also directly support accreditation, longitudinal research, and institutional memory. So this is about building a stable digital record over one hundred fifty years of journalism and culture in EBSCO's magazine archives.

So I'll walk through how the model works and then show how libraries actively use these gene research.

So the model is fairly straightforward. There's a one-time purchase that provides access back to volume one issue one. Usually, there are a couple exceptions, but that is generally the model.

And then there's a small annual fee, and that fee supports secure access via EBSCOhost, the reliability of the EBSCOhost system, and ongoing improvements. So very importantly, this isn't just hosting. It includes research tools, interface enhancements, and scalability. So libraries get stability and predictability.

I'd like to talk a bit about the value of EBSCO's Magazine Archives.

Magazines are often overlooked as research material, but they are some of the richest primary source material that libraries own. They capture history as it's unfolding, including social change, politics, science, culture, often in a way that no other format really does.

From a user perspective, these archives unlock the earliest issues of iconic publications, and that provides huge value for historical, sociological, and interdisciplinary research.

For librarians, the benefits are both operational and financial.

There is no time spent retrieving, shelving, repairing physical issues.

You can fill in gaps caused by lost or damaged copies in your own collection, your original collection.

And importantly, because it's a one-time purchase, it's ideal for special funding or capital budgets.

So one of the biggest strengths of magazine archives is their use as primary sources, as I've mentioned earlier.

Students and other users can see content exactly as it appeared, unaltered, in context, visually intact.

They can analyze not just the text, but adds imagery, tone, and layout.

This allows students to interpret it interpret history through the lens of time, and that's substantially different from reading a retrospective analysis or a textbook summary. So it's a powerful foundation for primary source literacy.

So I want to ground this in some real-world examples of case studies. These are the kinds of research and teaching use cases that libraries preserve through perpetual access.

Each example here shows that content becomes more valuable over time, not less.

We can look at consumer culture through advertising, celebrity culture, and environmental awareness.

These trends can only be studied properly with deep historical runs, and this is where Magazine Archives really shine.

Starting with the first example, which is the history of consumer culture through ads.

Advertising history is one of the most common uses of magazine archives, and it's actually a lot of fun.

Titles like Fortune, Vanity Fair, and Digest reveal how brands evolved.

Students can trace changes in luxury, lifestyle, and consumer values decade by decade.

It also supports business, marketing, sociology, and design programs. And these ads aren't just strictly visuals. They are cultural artifacts.

And so this kind of analysis, again, isn't possible without comprehensive, uninterrupted access.

And finally, our last example, the rise of celebrity culture. This is another area where historical context really matters.

Archives from People, Vanity Fair, and Esquire can show how celebrity identity was constructed over time. Students can explore how scandals were framed or avoided over time.

It can also show the shift from film stars to today's influencer culture.

And this resonates strongly with students while still being academically rigorous. Again, continuity across decades is key.

Oh, and we have one more example, climate change and environmental awareness. This is a perfect example of the long-term research value of magazine archives.

Using Atlantic, Science News, and National Review, students can trace early mentions of climate change. This allows a comparison between scientific reporting and opinion-based coverage.

It's invaluable for environmental studies, political science, and media literacy, and it underscores why losing access would be so damaging.

And so this is my wrap up slide. Perpetual access ensures that libraries own, not rent, their collections.

Libraries get DRM free e-books and stable curated magazine archives for these purchases.

It supports predictable costs and long-term planning, also delivers strong metadata, systems integration, and technical support. Most importantly, it protects teaching, learning, and discovery for future users.

Perpetual access doesn't just preserve content; it preserves knowledge infrastructure.

And now I think we will take questions.

Meg Quinn

Thank you, Courtney and Steph, for sharing your expertise on the topic of perpetual access. We do have time for questions now if you want to enter any into the question-and-answer box. Let me see.

So one attendee is asking, are there annual service fees?

Steph Moriarty

I'll answer for EBSCO eBooks first and then Courtney for archives. But for EBSCO eBooks, no. There are no fees. It's the cost of the book, and that's what it is.

Courtney Peckham

Conversely, in the magazine archive world, we do charge an annual fee.

Meg Quinn

And there is another question here. What is DRM free?

Steph Moriarty

So that means, you know, typically when you would download a DRM protected book, you have to sign in in order to do that, and then you'd only have it on your device for x amount of time in that, let's say, seven days. With DRM free, you don't need a login to do that, and you don't need to return it. So if you download it offline, that is on your device or your computer, essentially, infinitely, but that's the differentiation. So the DRM protected follows, you know, copyright regulations, making sure that book is conforming to the user models, and then the DRM free version is the publisher has chosen to lift that restriction, and the user can take that and have it in perpetuity on their own.

Meg Quinn

Great. Thank you. There's another question here. What happens to our perpetual access e-book titles if we cancel our full text research databases? Do we continue to access e-books?

Steph Moriarty

Good question. So through EBSCO eBooks in that example, if you were to cancel your other EBSCO resources, EBSCO will live on through your e-books. So you would own those truly in perpetuity. So that could be your only EBSCO resource, but you would have your e-book collection available forever.

Meg Quinn

Thank you. And there's another question. Is there any difference between DRM and DRM free in regards to perpetual access?

Steph Moriarty

So there is a differentiation when considering purchasing. So DRM free is only available on the unlimited user option when the publisher allows it. So on that slide, I had four hundred and seventy-five thousand of our books have that option available.

But on that same book, if you were to purchase just the single user access, for example, that version would be DRM protected because it's on a limited user model. So it's just on the unlimited user model when available from the publisher.

Meg Quinn

Okay. Great. And can you clarify how DRM limits, like download restrictions or user concurrency, apply to perpetually owned e-books versus the subscription titles?

Steph Moriarty

So they work the same. So if you have our EBSCO eBook subscriptions, it follows your, download settings that are placed in e-book manager, and that varies library to library. So you have the ability to customize your settings.

The default, if you've never touched it, is, seven days, but you have flexibility to change, download settings through there and do it on the access model as well as the individual title level.

Meg Quinn

Great. Thanks. Now this is for Mag Archives. With perpetual access to magazine archives, do we receive fixed content packages, or are they ongoing additions and back file updates over time?

Courtney Peckham

They are when you make the purchase, it's a fixed content set. We do have one archive that we've added an additional ten years to in the recent past. That was the Bloomberg Businessweek.

So if there is demand for it, we will create a upgrade version that you would you pay for that additional content, not you know, you've already paid for the bulk of the content. But so we will offer that if there's enough demand for it.

Meg Quinn

Okay. Thanks. And here's another question for about Mag Archives. What level of metadata and discoverability support is provided for magazine archives?

Courtney Peckham

Well, we do we the basic TOC that you would expect, author, page numbers, that sort of thing. But what's really valuable, obviously, is the subject indexing for articles, and we tag covers and we tag advertisements so that those are easily discoverable.

Meg Quinn

Great. And then how does perpetual access work if a publisher removes or updates content? Do we retain the exact version we originally purchased?

Steph Moriarty

Yeah. So for EBSCO eBooks, once you purchase it, that is yours. So if rights to that title change over time or the publisher no longer sells it, you get to retain that. The only aspect that would affect it is you wouldn't be able to upgrade to a higher user model if needed, but you would keep the copy and access model that you have.

Meg Quinn

I think we have just one more question. Do you offer access to own titles, short term loan, or is the DDM model direct to purchase?

Steph Moriarty

Yep. So it might be a typo with DDA, but okay. We do not offer the access to own model, but we do offer short term loans as well as demand driven acquisition. So for those that aren't familiar with demand driven acquisition, you put a pool of titles onto, your instance of EBSCOhost, and then the users drive the purchases. So if meaningful use occurs on that title, then it would trigger against, your balance on your DDA.

Meg Quinn

Are there any other questions? I don't see any others. So I think we'll wrap it up.

Thank you so much for joining us today. We hope you gained a lot of knowledge and insight. Just a reminder, we'll be sending a recording of today's webinar in a follow-up email. And if there are any other questions that come through, we will we'll send them out with answers in that same email. Thank you so much for joining us.