Evaluation and promotion: The cooperative purchase experience of academic libraries in China

CALIS is a nationwide academic library consortium in China. By coordinating, guiding, and organizing academic libraries, CALIS aims to minimize spending while obtaining foreign resources with the best prices and services. It also aims to meet the demands of teaching and research via the CALIS cooperative purchase service. Since 2005, there has been a customer satisfaction survey to evaluate this cooperative purchase service and the databases subscribed to by the CALIS consortium during the CALIS annual “imported database training week”. 494 staff members from 246 libraries took part in the fourth such survey to evaluate 87 databases cooperatively purchased in 2009. According to the survey, CALIS releases database usage reports and database evaluation rankings to help libraries analysis costs and make more informed collection developments decisions. Such survey activities provide a win–win situation, not only for CALIS and its member libraries, but also for database vendors. Survey results and usage reports help libraries analyze the quality of resources and provide evidence for libraries to choose among different purchasing options. Also, more promotional work has been done to enhance understanding, solve libraries' problems, and improve service quality. Finally, survey results and database evaluation rankings have been used to urge database vendors and publishers to make improvements relevant to libraries' development strategies.