MAS Ultra is designed for high school libraries with full text content for approx 500 popular magazines and is used primarily in ESL classes. Articles in the database are assigned Lexile reading level scores and MAS Ultra provides a Lexile score range search limiter; it is the only database available at VIU Library that provides this type of specialized metadata. Our analysis of usage patterns for MAS Ultra indicate that it is being used not just for its content (we have very similar content in other databases such as CBCA, Proquest Central and NexisUni), but also because it provides a convenient, familiar university-prep resource environment.

We did a similar overlap analysis for the “MAS Ultra - School Edition” database as for Academic Search, looking at overlap for magazines in MAS Ultra with significant usage (defined as at least 20 full text article retrievals (FTAR) in at least 2 years from 2020 to 2022 inclusive and/or at least 12 FTARs in January - July 2023). There are 100 magazines in MAS Ultra that met our “significant usage” benchmark; 96 of these have full (92) or partial (4) overlap with other VIU subscription databases. 

As noted above, content alone doesn’t account for all the ways in which this database is used at VIU. However, given the degree of content overlap, we do not feel that we can justify starting up a stand-alone subscription to MAS Ultra, at a cost of several thousand CAD per year, for the sake of maintaining access to this resource.