Any chance of expanding the “concurrent user limit” on Safari Tech Books? I couldn’t log on today, and I would really like to be able to have more reliable access to this resource… …because it offers a lot of utility to a lot of disciplines at a lot of different levels the 4 user limit seems awfully small for a University Temple’s size….

Thanks for sharing your concerns about getting access to Safari. It is great to hear that you find this to be a useful resource. We do obtain usage statistics for Safari from the producer of the database, and whenever someone is unable to connect because all four seats are in use – we call that a “turnaway” – we are notified in the statistical count. Here is the latest data we have on turnaways for Safari:

June 2009 – 2 turnaways
January 2009: 19 turnaways
September 2008: 191 turnaways

Other than September 2008, which seems a bit of an aberration, we rarely have turnaways, and that suggests our 4 seats are serving our user community well. Keep in mind that additional seats cost us additional dollars, and we have to make careful decisions about putting the right amount of money into a database like Safari so we aren’t wasting money on seats that go unused – and wasted money means less dollars for other important databases we need for Temple students and faculty.

One other thing to consider. Within the last week, during the time this suggestion was received, we were experiencing a number of difficulties with the technology that allows access to the databases from off campus. This may in fact be the source of your inability to connect to Safari – not a lack of seats. But we will continue to monitor the usage of seats for Safari and other databases and add seats when it seems necessary to meet the demand for access.