UN World Tourism Organisation Database

We currently have a trial of UNWTO's Elibrary and World Tourism Factbook. This allows access to all their electronic publications.

We have not looked at this before because it is rather costly, and we have always taken all the statistical publications and most of the monographs in hard copy anyway. However we did think that it would be interesting to at least compare the service given in this electronic subscription to the coverage we currently have on our shelves.

Access to Elibrary: http://www.e-unwto.org/home/main.mpx
Flyer: http://www.unwto.org/pub/doc/WTOelibrary_Flyer.pdf
Factsheet: http://www.unwto.org/pub/doc/WTOelibrary_Factsheet.pdf

I've had a quick look and my initial views are that the cost is not justified. We are looking at about £3,500 pa, whereas we currently spend less than £1000 pa on UNWTO publications. If we were starting a collection from scratch it would be a different matter, but we already have 8 years worth of statistics and most of their monographs on the shelves, and this would not give us future ownership of materials - only annual access.

I had thought that full-text searching of books would be a big plus-point, but my initial tests seem to indicate that the search functionality is very crude. I will be doing further assessments over this month.
We would be very interested in hearing your views on the coverage and useability of the product, and whether you think any extra functionality and access justify a large cost increase.
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This access will be active until the 31st January.
Please email me to request Username and Password for this trial.
l.tassoni@shu.ac.uk