Building relationships by building collections: A benchmarking analysis of business databases

Benchmarking is a commonly-used practice and efficient method to evaluate and to understand the quality and coverage of electronic resources. This article describes a case study designed to assess the business database holdings by comparing the University Library’s subscriptions to 16 peer and aspirational institutions. This analysis was an opportunity for the Business School and the University Library to partner on an initiative to ensure library databases represented the business disciplines and programs. The study utilized a benchmarking approach to recommend additional business database subscriptions. A list of the top 30 business databases was created by investigating which databases were held in common among these schools. The results were compared against the University Library’s current business database subscriptions.