The URICI (Scientific Information Resources Unit for Research) has been acquiring electronic book collections for the CSIC Library and Archives Network for 10 years. These collections are purchased directly from the corresponding publishers, processed and integrated into the Virtual Library and access to their texts is open to the entire CSIC community.

To satisfy requests for individual e-books, which arrive at the URICI when a library cannot make that purchase (either due to inability to manage or due to lack of budget) an account has been opened in OASIS, the e-book purchase platform of Proquest for academic libraries, with more than 2 million titles available, which is also integrated with ALMA, the library management system used in the CSIC Network.

Thanks to this connection, the user requests the purchase of the books from the Virtual Library and OASIS directly creates in ALMA a record that provides access to the resource, link to the MARC format and an invoice management procedure.

The acquisition process follows these steps:

a) The library user must make their request using the “Purchase Suggestion” form of the Virtual Library, once they have identified it with their CSIC credentials (see FAQ)

b) Alternatively, the library itself can create a purchase suggestion from within Alma and assign it to a user

c) The library reviews the data of the book and completes it if necessary

d) If the proposal is considered adequate, and the acquisition will be diverted to the URICI, the library assigns the request to the user “EBOOK PURCHASES” and from that moment URICI will be responsible for processing the purchase.

e) Once the book has been purchased, URICI will be responsible for including the bibliographic record in the Catalog and verifying that access is available. When the process is finished, and the book available in Primo, Alma will send a message communicating it to the email address of who appears as “applicant” in the purchase suggestion.

The titles acquired through this route will be accessible to all CSIC centers.

The fund that has been allocated to these centralized purchases is limited, for this reason the URICI will process the suggestions that follow the procurement policy of the e-book collection: the current title will be valued, date of recent publication, scientific quality, that is not already in the catalog in paper format, that is related to the subjects of the requesting center and consistent with the rest of the available digital collection.