Apologies for any duplication.
The CMDS Collection Development in Academic Libraries Interest Group met on
Saturday, July 11, 2009 from 1:30-3pm in the Palmer House, Adams Ballroom.
Julia Gelfand (jgelfand_at_uci.edu) convener for 2009 introduced the topic and made
a few announcements:
· The convener for 2010 is Gwyneth Crowley at Yale and she invites you to
contact her with ideas for future meetings (gwyneth.crowley_at_yale.edu)
· The incoming-convener for 2011 will be Jared Ingersoll at Vanderbilt
(jared.ingersoll_at_vanderbilt.edu)
· Julia has promised to submit “Guidelines” and Contact Information for
how to arrange future meetings, interact with ALCTS, handle publicity,
engage in partnerships with other ALCTS IGs and committees, how to communicate
with persons interested in this discussion group and other duties.
The theme for the ALA 2009 meeting was: Patron Initiated Collection Development
in Academic Libraries: Sharing Local Experiences and
Implications for Change.” Julia acknowledged assistance from several vendors
including Stephen Pugh from Coutts, in identifying library customers
that were currently involved in patron initiated collection development
experiences. Three librarians from different library environments (enrollment,
collection size, etc) were invited to share their experiences and how they
determined whether to begin such an initiative and how they rolled it out,
lessons learned so far, new procedures that they had to introduce to have a
successful program and methods they were using to evaluate the merits of the
program. Vendors and suppliers were purposefully not invited to make a
presentation but instead were encouraged to contribute to the discussion.
88 persons attended the session.
Three speakers/facilitators/commentators shared the backgrounds of their
institutions, libraries and current collection development activities for the
selection of books/monographs and then addressed how they launched the patron
initiated collection development programs and what its current status is today.
First speaker was: Jonathan Nabe, Collection Development Librarian for Science
& Technology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (SIUC) (jnabe_at_lib.siu.edu)
Background / Context:
· SIU is largest open stack library in US
· There was a philosophical agreement of goals and a consortia offer (via
the Great Western Library Alliance, GWLA) with Coutts via MyiLibrary platform
(http://www.couttsinfo.com/) & SIUC
decided to take offer with a 10 % discount to open a deposit account to which
additional funds can be added. Library made initial deposit of $15,000, later
added $28,000 on 900 books
· Library staff wanted to offer more eBooks
Operations & Assumptions
· once a title was checked out twice the library is charged and then owns
title as an eBook
· selection of titles:
o LC classes used to establish profile and report of titles is run against
that, and delivered to library for tweaking
o Title report can be tweaked by publisher, readership level, LCSH and price
o set limits by price - such as maximum cost of $ 400/title
· MARC records delivered and initially they needed tweaking or revisions;
ISBNs in particular a problem
· did not want to duplicate with print coverage
· important that once library had acquired title, that access be in public
catalog
· no marketing was done – items were found by discovery and searching only
· subsequently, adding new titles made possible via OASIS
Results & Experience to date
· 45% STM, 45% Social Sciences, 10 % Arts and Humanities
· cheapest was $9.00; most expensive was $449.00; average price was
$130.00; median price was $123.00
· 16% were University Press titles & most are at readership levels of
research/professional, and support undergraduate readers
· average 4.5 uses per title – total for purchased titles with median
measurement of 3.5 uses
· MyiLibrary defaults to opening the book when the link in the catalog is
clicked, thus incurring one “use” ; SIU did some programming so that clicked
link would take the user to a book summary page, where they would have to click
on a “Read This Book” link to actually open the book and a “use” be counted
· money was spent quickly, in 5 months & then added $28k to continue program
· lessons learned:
o important to thoroughly review title list to avoid purchase of unwanted titles
o use of eBooks is greater than typical use of print collection
o invoicing is cumbersome and it is important to check closely
· expect to see program continue as users want eBooks
· major concerns:
o ILL, which is not allowed
o Archiving purchased titles, which is not currently possible
Second speaker was Jim Dooley, Head of Collection Services at the University of
California, Merced (jdooley_at_ucmerced.edu)
Context
· New campus that UC opened in 2005 with current enrollment of 2700
undergraduates; just had first graduating class and awarded first PhDs; mostly
STM oriented at this time; considered a growth campus
· Collection includes 24,000 online journals; no print journals
· 500,000 bibliographic records for electronic monographs (eBooks, EEBO,
ECCO, etc)
· 82,000 print books
· 90% of collection are eResources
Experience with Patron Initiated Collection Development
· EBook library - patron initiation program began in 2006 with EBL
(http://www.eblib.com/)
· purchased 804 titles costing approx $100,000
· shifted to short term loans meaning that on the 4th access, library owns;
· 559 titles acquired this way with 50-55% STM; < 50 % Social Science, the
rest Arts and Humanities
· 59% EBL titles acquired, were checked out again
· receive MARC records - seeing improved records with LCSH
· Campus’ second experience was with Coutts - spent $59,000 in the same
method as described by SIUC
· Basically got full EBL collection and from Coutts 8K records based on
profile
Issues and lessons learned that contributed to success of program:
1. invoicing-need improvements to track expenditures
2. prompt updating of MARC records needed
3. made MyiLibrary and EBL a searchable database
4. users need to find content / UC is putting up its Next Generation MELVYL
(NGM) via OCLC’s WorldCat Local to be new consortia catalog for all 10 UC
campuses; this means vendor records must be in WorldCat
5. Usage statistics needed to track trends
6. For MyiLibrary, blocked certain publishers and title lists restricted to
08-09 imprints with academic content
Third speaker was Mary Woodley, Collection Development Coordinator at California
State University, Northridge (CSUN) (mary.woodley_at_csun.edu)
Background / Context
· CSUN has 27,000 FTE
· mostly undergraduate population with more hybrid/distance students each term
· online / remote access definitely needed for online courses
· use of print collection had noticeably declined
· started with Computer Science and Reference titles from a range of
publishers
· reviewed the British eBook Study about patron initiated requests for new
books - A library from the UK said their universities generally purchase
several textbooks for each class so they try to ensure that at least one of
those copies is in electronic format. They participated in the JISC eBook
Observatory Project. This project focuses on eTextbooks and their impact on the
eBook market both in pricing and licensing. More information about this project
can be found at http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/
· small book budget meant that we had to have limits on eBook expenditures
· patron initiated program driven by student approval to use part of their
Quality Fees to support; program started in April 2009
· watched for the success of the CSU Fresno MyiLibrary experience
Operations & Experiences
· used Student fees and created a deposit account with $25,000 for eBooks,
Library added $15,000 to the project budget
· restricted to English only; 2008-09 publication dates only
· no Reference materials were obtained in this program – those resources
were acquired through other means via Sage/Gale publisher & consortia offers, etc
· maximum cost was $165/title
· currently have 7,000 eBook titles from Coutts
· can deselect- non-purchased titles semi-automatically
· did no marketing
· 2nd major order - did not drop titles that duplicated existing print or
online titles; added specific fields in the records for ease of collocation and
management
· examined usage pattern stats - how many pages used
· business literature used most during Summer session, but on the whole,
selections were across all disciplines & subject matter
Questions raised in the discussion and short responses – may want to develop
more formalized FAQs
· About special pages on library websites, where; integration with online
catalog; Summary page about program? Needed programming support
· Asked where 500k eBook holdings @ Merced – where did they come from –
some were from consortia shared resources, others were free or OA titles or from
special publishers such as National Academies Press (www.nap.edu)
· Role of faculty – did many requests come from them or from students?
Mostly from students.
· Resource sharing-impacts on ILL - since patron driven requests have a
history in how ILL requests lend to collection development actions, what are
implications in this model for ILL? Dictated by publishers and the licensing.
Springer has been most generous in lending/sharing access to eBooks;
one reason the UC campuses bought ebook backfile 2006-08 and current year.
Books on libraries’ Coutts’ MyiLibrary platform does not allow ILL or sharing.
“Best Practices” for patron initiated requests and for eBooks in general must
address ILL needs until new methods are available to share content among
institutional users/readers
· Differences between “Browse MyiLibrary site” and “Browse-only LibColl”
and Find/Search?
· Linking to content? EBL + Coutts are each SFX compliant
· User behavior – do readers read or search?
· Copying and printing needs? Springer offers Print on Demand @ 24.95 –
UC is experimenting with this; MyiLibrary is not very print or download friendly
· Timeouts? With Coutts can be set at 10 min after no activity
· Changes that local experiences have demonstrated? At SIUC may propose
changing to acquire titles after 3 uses before buying
· What about eBook packages? Ebrary offers 42,000 titles in Academic
Complete Collection
· What about concurrent users? EBL+ MyiLibrary: unlimited concurrent reader
What about Archiving? Good to own vs lease to archive on own servers
Resources that may be helpful for additional information, including current &
recent papers & presentations:
· Ellen Safley, When customers select customer - initiated acquisition of
E-Books in an Academic Library – IFLA 2009 presentation at
http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla75/212-safley-en.pdf
· Sue Polanka’s article on Off the Shelf at
http://www.booklistonline.com/default.aspx?page=show_product&pid=3226359
· Are We Ready for eBook Approval Plans – notes from ALA MW 2009 meeting
of ALCTS Acquisitions Section -
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/resources/ano/v20/n1/event/ALA_print_layout_1_528805_528805.cfm
Major eBook Vendors servicing Academic Libraries that have patron initiated
book ordering programs and can be contacted for additional information:
· NetLibrary ( http://www.netlibrary.com/)
· Coutts (http://www.coutts.info.com)
· EBL (http://www.eblib.com/)
· eBrary (http://www.ebrary.com)
· YBP – (http://www.ybp.com)
Recorded by Julia Gelfand
Received on Wed Aug 05 2009 - 03:02:47 EDT