[Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDA

[Amy Lynn Fry]

Again, if what we're concluding is that because overall circulation is falling, a) we should buy fewer print books, because b) it shows they are not valued by users, I think that's a cognitive leap we should not be making. Overall circulation is definitely falling at my library. But the strong use of our recent purchases in no way indicates that we should stop building our print collections. I think others might be surprised, if they looked at their local data, at what the use of their print collections really is. I do not think Bowling Green would be special. The only thing I can think that might set us apart is that we're part of OhioLINK and therefore have so many potential users for our books - perhaps more than other libraries. But that is speculation.

Instead, I think users are getting more selective because our tools are better and are using more non-monograph materials because they are both more acceptable as sources and much easier to find and use, partially because of discovery layers. I think that some of the older or more secondary books that would have been used 10 years ago in a different information landscape are being replaced by these other materials. So I think weeding is great. I think using off-site storage and deduping lesser used materials is great. I think we can use this data and the evolution of this information landscape to make good choices about maintaining physical collections that will look different than the ones we maintained in the past. But I DON'T think it means that users don't need good books, that librarians can't make good decisions about choosing books, or that purchasing print books and even journals is an activity we can turn our backs on wholesale - and a lot of people do think that. At ARLIS this spring I listened to a museum publisher talk about how most exhibition catalogs will never be produced as ebooks. My dean keeps floating the idea that we don't need print journals, when we have quite a few art journals that are simply not available electronically for libraries. Maybe one day all of this will change, and people will not want any print, but that day is not here, and I am tired of librarians pushing for it.

I did my study after we ran out of money for firm orders last year in October. October! I asked people at my library why the book budget had been set so low and they said they thought it was because people probably thought we were just buying a bunch of books that never get used. I figured I'd find out - no sense in spending money on books no one wants - we're not an ARL or a collection of record for much. I went into it expecting to find much more disappointing statistics.

After I got the print book stats, I got the ebook stats to compare.

I have a nearly complete manuscript I am working on with a colleague and plan to make the data available when I publish. The stats are for all firm-order and approval books purchased for the main circulating collection in each fiscal year from 2008-09 through 2013-14. Other than the few of these that get put on reserve I can't think of anything that would make these statistics artificially high - and, again, I counted percent of books used at least once, not numbers of circulations, so any reserve title would just be a count of one.

I also have a longer lit review that is currently out for review about how the idea that libraries are buying a bunch of things that never get used and we should replace traditional selection with DDA to solve this problem has been popularized and why, and the weaknesses in many of the claims that have been made in this literature about print and ebook use.

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 Rick Anderson
Sent: Friday, September 25, 2015 9:11 AM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDA


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.

Not necessarily. For example, I've gathered data for one major subset of academic libraries that shows not only a significant decrease in circulation itself, but also that when enrollment trends are taken into account, the rate of decrease is sharper than raw circulation figures themselves indicate. This study required me to gather (by hand) all circulation and enrollment data reported by approximately 120 ARL libraries over a 13-year period. I published my study in Library Journal (http://bit.ly/1iPRK3A) and included links to the complete data set so that anyone who wishes to can check my analysis or run analysis of their own.

Obviously, my study was only of ARL libraries, and it would be a mistake to assume that its findings are necessarily typical for all kinds of libraries, and Amy is absolutely right to say that none of us should assume that any study done at another library will necessarily tell us what's going on in our individual libraries. All of us need to make strategic decisions about collection development based on what's happening with our patrons in our institutions. In my own library, our usage trends track very closely to those of ARL libraries as a whole-and our reshelving statistics are down sharply as well over the same period. (Interestingly, both our circ and our reshelving rates have ticked up a bit over the past couple of years, suggesting that usage is bottoming out and may not decline much further.)

I join Melissa in inviting Amy to share more information about the print use rates she's seeing at Bowling Green State. Is the data set available?

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
rick.anderson at utah.edu<mailto:rick.anderson at utah.edu>
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