Information Services and Library for Faculty

If you plan to buy a dataset with your own budget, whether it’s an ongoing subscription or a one-off data download,  we can offer assistance with dealing with suppliers and with contracts or licensing.

Please contact the Library for advice and we can liaise with you at whatever stage of the process you have reached (though it’s best if we are involved early on). Here are some of the ways we can help you:

• Liaison with suppliers. It is often necessary for you to discuss your requirements directly with the supplier, as faculty requests can be complex, but we can facilitate this for you.

• Help set up trials. We can arrange for database trials and library staff can also take part in a trial to help in the evaluation. See below for more information and some recent examples. 

• Technical Issues. We can help with any technical aspects of a purchase.

• Invoice Processing. We can do this on your behalf.

• Contract checking. Dataset contracts should always be submitted to the Library for checking prior to signature, to ensure that the contract meets School requirements as well as your own.  We can contact the School’s lawyer for further advice if necessary.

The School benefits from the Library being involved in all dataset purchases so that we have a central overview of all subscriptions.

The AQR Institute has some funding available for purchasing datasets to support research. Please contact Eleanor Eiserman for more information about their bidding process but please include the Library in your discussions with the supplier.

 Recent dataset purchases include:

 For more information on these datasets, please contact the Library

Having a trial of a potential new resource is the best way to assess content and functionality. Publishers are usually happy to provide trial access, although sometimes they will restrict the available content or functionality to prevent abuse.  Another option is to ask the publisher to send sample data. Please contact us to arrange trials so that we can make the best use of a trial and look at the product ourselves too.

Recent trials include;

QAD

Eikon

Responsible Investor

If you would like to discuss any of these recent trials with us, or would like us to try and arrange a new trial please email library@london.edu