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Q: What is INSPIRE?
A: Here is the INSPIRE About page. The cost of INSPIRE to the state was a little less than $2,000,000/ year. While difficult to quantify, if every resident and / or institution benefiting from INSPIRE paid for the subscriptions by individually, it would cost well well over 2 million / year!
For GC, INSPIRE hugely supplements our collection. While we would not necessarily subscribe to everything that INSPIRE provides, a substantial portion of INSPIRE is important to us. These significant portions are outlined elsewhere in this guide.
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Q: What is the actual loss in terms of usage to GC?
A: This is a difficult question to answer as there are lots of intangible factors. Last year, the GC community used ~100,000 items (journal articles, books, videos, etc...) from our collections. For us an item is "used" when it is downloaded, checked out, or looked at for a significant amount of time. How each vendor measures usage can differentiate, but there are some industry standards that most vendors comply with. Browsing usage, such as searches, abstract/ record browsing, and "in-library non-reserve" usage are NOT counted here because these uses (while significant) are more difficult to measure and presumably something browsed but not downloaded or checked out indicates that the item has less value.
Of the ~100,000 uses, about ~10,000 of them came from INSPIRE databases that were either cut or downgraded. However, there are some important caveats:
1) Often, databases replicate content, so some of the 10,000 uses might still be available in another database.
2) Not every database vendor counts their usage in the same manner. EBSCO tends to be a bit more "conservative" in this regard in that a usage is usually an actual download or click into the article (as opposed to time spent on a page). In other words, it is safe to sort of consider an EBSCO use as slightly more of a "use" than some other databases. Hence, the reason why we put the range at 10-15%.
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Q: What do you mean by "loss"?
A: We lost the ability to access these materials immediately. In most cases, the indexing was not lost.
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Q: What about content I use to teach my classes (links to articles, ebooks, ect...)?
A: IF you downloaded a pdf and then uploaded a readable copy to Moodle, then you should be fine. For a while now, this has been the recommended practice largely because students often need a readable (sometimes referred to as OCR) pdf for accessibility reasons.
If you linked to the article or e-book, then access went away.
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Q: What should I do?
A: It is highly recommended that you check all of your links to make sure the content is still there! If it is missing, contact us and / or look for the resource in our catalog. It could very well be that the resource is available in another database. For articles, download the article first and then reupload as a pdf.
E-books can present a special issue. For copyright reasons, E-books usually cannot be downloaded in their entirety. IF you only need a chapter or two from an ebook (10% or less of the total book), it is recommended that you post just the chapters you need. IF you need the entire ebook and it has gone away, please contact us [library@goshen.edu], and we will try to purchase the ebook for you.
Note: Broken or missing links might not be related to the INSPIRE cuts at all. While generally more stable than this current situation, content is moving in and out of databases all of the time! So it is good practice to double-check those links regardless.
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Q: Is this the end of the cuts?
A: That is difficult to say, but we do not think so. In reality, the state legislator cut the entirety of INSPIRE. But reallocations from the Indiana State Library budget and existing grant funding has saved about 1/2 of INSPIRE this year. IF NOTHING ELSE HAPPENS, then INSPIRE will go away entirely by June of 2026.
Important note: Because of this distinct possibility, we highly recommend that you check your links not only for classes taught this semester but all your others as well. But you have a year to do it. And you do NOT have to check every link, just those coming from EBSCO databases. If you are linking to an article in an EBSCO database, it is probably a good idea to upload a pdf copy instead. If you are linking to an e-book, make note of the e-book for now. We will be in touch with further instructions.
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Q: What's next / What are you doing now?
A: Right now, the libraries in higher ed across the state are pursuing a number of avenues collectively. Most of us feel strongly that when it comes to access to academic content as provided by academic vendors (Wiley, PROQUEST, OXFORD, EBSCO) everyone is better served if we can negotiate an agreement together. Tactics include:
All of these activities take time. For GC, we are giving these efforts until December or January to materialize before making a decision for the 2026-2027 year.