[Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDA

Thu Sep 24 08:02:02 PDT 2015

The reasons for lower circulation ARE legion. Circulation is a complex issue and there have been many, many studies done about its connection to enrollment, circulation period, collection size, method of selection, etc., etc. MANY factors impact print book circulation.

A lower rate of overall book circulation is often given as a reason for moving to DDA. It is taken as an indication that either librarians aren’t buying the right books or books are less valuable to patrons. Accepting this reasoning, however, demonstrates a lack of critical thought and ignorance of or deliberate ignoring of data. Overall circulation at my library is falling. But we also have about 200 fewer full-time faculty than we did 8 years ago, lower graduate student enrollment, longer circulation periods locally and consortially, and we no longer default our users to books only on our home page search – we use our discovery layer now.

I looked at the circulation rate of recent purchases and it’s very high. 75% of the books we bought 7 years ago have been used at least once, and 64% of the books we bought between 2008 and 2013 have been used at least once (when I ran the data, that included books we’d bought as recently as one year earlier). That’s really strong. That does not indicate to me that we aren’t buying the right books or that our patrons don’t value books. If we stop buying because overall circulation is lower then we stop buying precisely what is most valuable to them – recent publications.

I also looked at the use rate of the ebooks we’ve bought during the same period. It’s about 10%.

The figure Melissa gives of 50% of the books librarians buy never getting used is thrown around a LOT. Usually when this claim is made it’s made without citation or with citing the Pittsburgh study and the Cornell study only. In fact, many print use studies exist, and some show circulation rates much higher than this. Few study books that have been owned long enough to reach maximum use potential (7 or 12 years). As far as I know, no follow-up studies have been done. It is dangerous to think this figure applies to your books at your library unless you do the study yourself. It’s not hard to find out if your recently-purchased print books are being used. It’s not hard to find out what your lowest-use areas for print books are. Librarians pushing for DDA aren’t doing their homework and it’s hugely damaging to our collections and our missions and our users and I’m worried this whole boat is going to sink because of it.

At my library, we are under intense pressure to buy more ebooks, despite the fact that all existing data show that users prefer print, ebooks are lower-use and more expensive than print, and print use is strong. ALL the studies that claim that ebooks are used more than print compare ebook “uses” to print book circulations. Some even admit that these numbers are not at all comparable. If you look at rate of use or use of books in each format, ebooks don’t actually get more use, but there are few studies that do this.

In the end, we’re going to do DDA. I think we’ll find that people will turn to our print books more than they will choose ebooks, and/or we will not end up spending very much money on DDA. DDA allows us to buy more ebooks without wasting money on ebooks, which I believe is very easy to do. I hope we will end up targeting our DDA subject profile towards our low-use print book subject areas to replace print purchasing in low-use areas with the potential to purchase ebooks in areas which I suspect will not get purchased very often. That will allow us to spend more on the print books we know our users are using – because we’ve done our research and know which ones those are.

In the meantime, however, print selection that used to be spread out among a large number of librarians is now being done by just a few people – and most of them aren’t buying because they have a million billion other responsibilities. The librarians who used to do it are happy not to anymore, but don’t appreciate the fact that letting our highly-used print collection suffer and dwindle will affect them, too. Because once the library starts not having what students need, they start going elsewhere, and once our users go elsewhere that’s it.

This is not an old librarian/young librarian issue. It’s not a conservative luddite vs. an I’m-willing-to-try-new-things-and-accept-disruptive-technologies issue. How we are destroying our collecting of print materials and the makeup of our collections despite the hard evidence that exists about ebooks is an issue that will fundamentally affect our future. I think ebooks and DDA have a place in our collections – but print books and librarian selection are still important and effective. There’s no substitute.

Amy Fry
Associate Professor, Electronic Resources Coordinator
Bowling Green State University
Jerome Library
Bowling Green, OH 43403
afry at bgsu.edu
email is the best way to reach me

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Kenneth A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2015 11:08 AM
To: Melissa Belvadi; Smith, Kelly
Cc: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDA

I would dispute the idea that the success of PDA entails an implicit criticism of the performance of librarians.  For years, material budgets have been static or shrinking, making it necessary to be more selective than ever before.   In the past, you may have bought all three books on a topic, now you can only purchase one.  How do you choose?   PDA programs take the pressure off by leaving the final decision to end users.  This makes them a great tool that came at the right moment.

What about the low levels of circulation?

Here’s a situation I see all the time while I’m weeding:  “good” books that haven’t circulated in the last 20 years.  These are books that are listed on standard bibliographies, are referenced in textbooks, and are recognized by subject experts as classics.  There may be a tremendous secondary literature that has grown up around them.  Often they are still in print.  I would stay this constitutes good evidence that these items are “good” and still relevant to their field.  It is most certainly not “it was a good choice because I thought it was a good choice.”  There is objectivity here.

Circulation figures have been dropping at my library for years.  Why?  Have the librarians been getting worse at collection development?  The reasons are potentially legion.  Our students could be less prepared for college.  They could work more and have less time.  They could have ingrained habits of using the internet for school assignments.  Perhaps they are writing fewer term papers, or their assignments are less challenging.  A lot has changed in the last 20 years, much of it not good for the library world.

As a matter of professional philosophy, I think this issue cuts deep.  If librarians are not competent to identify good books, then how can we answer reference questions authoritatively?  How are we different from the internet, other than being slower and a lot more expensive?

--Ken Smith
Head of Acquisitions, Serials & Collection Development
Odum Library
Valdosta State University
1500 North Patterson Street
Valdosta, GA 31698
229-245-3734

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 3:15 PM
To: Smith, Kelly
Cc: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDA

"...it takes the pressure of finding resources off of our liaisons..."

This raises an interesting professional philosophy issue. About half of our librarians are very happy to have that pressure removed, and the other half, mostly the older half, have expressed the concern that a core part of their professional responsibility and expertise is being disrespected and taken away from them.

You have to admit that the fact that we've jumped on patron-driven selection the moment it became technologically and logistically feasible does implicitly criticize the work the librarians have been doing for literally decades, since we abandoned it as soon as we had another choice.

The conversation becomes even more difficult when trying to present them with hard data, as I have done internally, that demonstrates that about half of the books they selected never circulated at all. They get cornered into making absurd arguments like "it doesn't matter if a book doesn't circulate for 50 years, if I thought it was a good choice, it was a good choice."

Melissa

On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Smith, Kelly <Kelly.Smith2 at eku.edu<mailto:Kelly.Smith2 at eku.edu>> wrote:
Our philosophy is that if you really want to embrace DDA, you can no longer commit to allocating at the subject level. A few years ago, we stopped allocating for monographs and now only have one large monograph fund. We feared that we might over-spend or not collect in certain areas, but that has not been born out.

In addition to eBook DDA profile programs, we also use demand driven acquisitions for pretty much any resource that is requested via ILL. If requests fit our collecting guidelines, we purchase rather than borrow them.

This approach might not work at every library, but at our regional comprehensive university, it is a good solution for us. In addition to meeting the immediate needs of our students and faculty, it takes the pressure of finding resources off of our liaisons whose time is stretched thin and who are not necessarily specialists in their assigned subjects.

For now, we still assign subject fund codes to everything purchased for tracking purposes.

Kelly Smith
Coordinator of Collections and Discovery
Eastern Kentucky University Libraries
email kelly.smith2 at eku.edu<mailto:kelly.smith2 at eku.edu> | research guides<http://libguides.eku.edu/prf.php?account_id=300>
[EKU-Libraries-Logo---Maroon]<http://www.library.eku.edu/>

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org>] On Behalf Of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 12:20 PM
To: Katy Ginanni <ksginanni at email.wcu.edu<mailto:ksginanni at email.wcu.edu>>
Cc: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDA

Our experience with DDA is that it actually spends far less than everyone fears. So we consider DDA purchases as if the liaisons had firm-ordered them for budget line purposes.  We haven't come anywhere close to the scenario you describe.  If you have to worry about  patrons buying worse choices of books than your liaisons want to select, your DDA profiles are probably too broad.

Melissa Belvadi, UPEI

On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Katy Ginanni <ksginanni at email.wcu.edu<mailto:ksginanni at email.wcu.edu>> wrote:
Hi folks,

{Apologies for duplication. I’ll post this to several ists.}

I wonder if anyone out there has come up with some magical scheme or prediction or formula for how to allocate subject or program-based funds to pay for DDA/PDA purchases?

When we started our DDA program, we limited the profile to subjects that would support our distance and/or online programs. We paid for all purchases from one fund. Now we are thinking of expanding the DDA plan to cover all programs, and we’re wondering how to allocate money from the subject/program-based funds. For print books, we’ve been experimenting with an allocation formula that includes several criteria or factors (student credit hours per department, # faculty per department, etc.). But we’re struggling with how to factor in ebooks. How can we predict what we might spend on ebooks and what we should put aside for print books? For example: Let’s say the history department gets $15,000 to spend. Halfway into the year, DDA books have eaten all of that allocation but the liaison still has print books she wants to buy.

Our usage of ebooks – among all purchases, not just the DDA-initiated ones – is spread across many disciplines. That’s why we are thinking about putting additional subject areas in our DDA profile.

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.

Katy G.

Katy Ginanni, Acquisitions Librarian & Asst Professor
Hunter Library
Western Carolina University
176 Central Drive
Cullowhee, NC 28723
ksginanni at email.wcu.edu<mailto:ksginanni at email.wcu.edu>
828-227-3729<tel:828-227-3729> office
library.wcu.edu<http://library.wcu.edu>

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--
Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca> 902-566-0581<tel:902-566-0581>

--
Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca<mailto:mbelvadi at upei.ca> 902-566-0581

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