About us
Our mission
Exceptional teaching, effective learning, and high levels of student achievement rely on high quality, trustworthy content.
From academic journals and multimedia databases to international newspapers, magazines, and historical records, we provide access to curated resources from some of the world’s top publishers.
For Further Education colleges, JCS provides access to trusted and carefully curated resources from some of the world’s top publishers – helping your students achieve academic success.
For Public Libraries, we represent Findmypast for their highly-rated and extensive family history archive, and for the British Newspaper Archive which Findmypast also host.
The JCS service provides:
- 14-day unlimited trials so you can explore resources in depth before committing
- a single point of contact for all subscriptions saving you time and hassle
- support throughout your subscriptions.
Our story
The JCS story begins in 2008 with a pioneering government initiative to support schools’ access to premium educational resources.
The initiative was a success, but when funding suddenly ended in 2010, rather than let this valuable service disappear, the Project Director, Joyce Martin, left her public sector career to establish JCS Online Resources as an independent enterprise.
This change enabled JCS to extend its service to UK Further Colleges and Joyce began negotiating licence agreements for this new sector and securing best pricing for colleges as well.
Not long after JCS started expanding its reach, Joyce was approached by Findmypast – provider of the essential family history archive and host of the British Newspaper Archive – to represent them for UK and ANZ public libraries which JCS has now done for 11 years.
About our Founder
Joyce Martin began her career in teaching before moving into the public sector during the emergence and growth of the internet. During this transformative period, she had the privilege of leading several national initiatives to promote e-learning across UK higher and further education institutions, as well as schools.
Through this work – and prompted by the extraordinary growth of the internet as an information source – Joyce developed a strong commitment to ensuring that schools, colleges and public libraries had access to high-quality digital content at the best possible prices. After 15 years, this ambition has become the foundation of JCS: supporting further education colleges and public libraries along with secondary schools worldwide to secure affordable, sustainable access to high-quality digital content.