Ebook Publication Dates
From:
"Geller, Marilyn" <mgeller_at_lesley.edu>
(Cross posted for widest distribution)
Over the past several months, we have noticed that publishers are using
the date of digitization of monographs as what they call the publication
date. The content has not changed at all, but the format has. Our
latest example is a title that was originally published in 1986 and made
digitally available within the last few months. The publisher has
identified this as a 2014 publication. We've seen this on publisher
websites as well as in vendor supplied collections, and it has caused
some confusion on several different fronts.
Students are using the digitization date in their exquisitely formatted
citations. When faculty review the student work, they either mark the
reference as having an incorrect date or believe that a new edition has
been published which they want to acquire or want the library to
acquire. Selectors spend extra time trying to determine whether this is
a new edition that we should spend our meager monograph funds on or just
a new format of something that we already have. Many libraries
configure their DDA profiles to limit to titles published in a small
range of current years, e.g., titles from 2011 to present, and these
newly formatted versions which list the digitization date instead of the
publication date are included in the DDA collection even though they do
not represent current content. In many of our OPACs, the relevancy
ranking uses the publication date as one of its measures, giving more
weight to recent dates so that these titles show up higher on a results
list than they would if the actual publication date was used.
Sometimes this is not just confusing but dangerously misleading. We
found an example of a book on AIDS research that was published in 1993
and digitized in 2014. A monograph on AIDS from 1993 is very different
from a monograph on AIDS from 2014.
Are other libraries finding this problematic? What can we ask
publishers to do to acknowledge that something is newly digitized but
represents the original content?
Marilyn Geller
Collection Management Librarian
Sherrill Library
Lesley University
617.349.8859 /mgeller_at_lesley.edu <mailto:mgeller_at_lesley.edu>
Profile: http://research.lesley.edu/profile.php?uid=5428
Research: http://ir.flo.org/lesley/viewResearcherPage.action?researcherId=2
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Received on Sat Aug 16 2014 - 03:06:38 EDT