To have a single copy of 1,000 titles would cost around 10,000. With many licenses only lasting 2 years, you'd have to buy them all again in 2 years. The shared collection has copies all our schools borrow from. We carefully manage copy counts so it is very similar to having your own copy of each title. but at a much lower cost. Why because we keep a lot of copies or really popular titles but relatively few copies of less popular titles. 

Primary and Secondary shared collections contain different titles.

Each time a school joins we add more copies to the collection to make sure almost all the titles are available all the time. The shared nature of the system means we need a few simple rules to make sure the copies are shared fairly amongst the group. For example, your school can only borrow one copy of a title at a time, so this precludes class sets. We also have a limit on the loans per month, which is set quite high so that very few schools reach it. These few simple rules allow us to offer these amazing collections at incredibly low prices.

Each tim.