Number One — Community Building

Fortunately for us, we already have quite a few librarian friends, but there is always room for more. In 2019 we aim to speak with as many librarians as possible. We want to hear about your daily challenges, your long-term goals, industry insights and career achievements. As part of this, we are starting a blog series (the first of which will be posted very soon) in which we ask librarians a short set of questions that should only take a minute or two to answer.

Would you like to participate? Get in touch — institutions@exacteditions.com

On a more professional note, we will be attending events such as the London Book Fair and conferences run by CILIP, JISC and UKSG. These events are very informative for us and a great opportunity to put some faces to names. Beyond that, we will be aiming to visit more libraries in person, or if you are too far away, to arrange a phone call. If you’d like to meet-up or speak over the phone, then please do let us know.

Finally, we have the library advisory board, complete with new members who will be introduced in the next round of questions! We hope that these efforts will put librarians at the heart of our strategy. We want our service to be the best it can be, and in order to achieve that, we want to continue getting to know the proactive and famously friendly library community.

Number Two — Content, Content, Content

2018 was a great year for content acquisition at Exact Editions. We had a number of new periodicals join the institutional platform, including the illustrious Times Literary Supplement which has proved very popular with customers around the world.

We’ve also started 2019 with a bang, introducing several new music titles from Future. Now the aim is to keep this momentum going and our dedicated content acquisition team will be looking to secure more titles for the platform, so keep an eye out and send us any recommendations.

The word of a librarian can carry a lot of weight in discussions with publishers, and of course, we always love to find new magazines.

Which periodical would you like to see on Exact Editions?
Let us know at institutions@exacteditions.com

Number Three —The Next Level

At Exact Editions, we are continually looking to the future and what can be described as the ‘Next Level’. This involves a balance of consolidating our current position and seeking new opportunities. To achieve this we have to have a strong, cohesive team and plenty of ideas.

We have Tech, who are constantly searching for ways to improve the online Web reader, the Exactly apps and the customer experience on our shop pages. They are working to align with the needs of libraries, in particular using the advice that we have received from meetings with librarians. And on top of this, they are developing new and exciting features for our subscribers, more will be revealed on the latest of these in the near future…

We have Production and Account Managers who work tirelessly to bring new publishers onboard and control the flow of content on the site. Without their work, we wouldn’t have the New Humanist archive dating back to 1884 or the enormous archive of The Tablet which is still in production. I suppose in a sense they are quite similar to librarians; acquiring, preserving and organising content for future readers. With more archives on the way, steam will be coming off of Production’s keyboards.

Finally, Marketing and Finance, who are the first point of contact for librarians and subscription agents. They will be coming up with new and innovative ways to spread the word about our favourite magazines and make sure that current subscribers are happy. Expect to see new email designs, plenty of blog posts and tweets.