[Eril-l] FW: [EXTERNAL] request for examples of libraries almost entirely non-firm ordering, print and e

[Diane Westerfield]

It’s true that we are a small private liberal arts school, heavily residential, sitting on a big endowment. Our library has endowed funds that are restricted to book purchases, but almost none of those funds are restricted to a particular subject so there’s no strife over who spends what.  We are often encouraged to keep on spending those funds down as much as possible.

We are also small enough that all librarians besides the director wear many hats – we have liaison duties, reference desk shifts, and particular specialties; most of us are supervisors. Humanities librarian also supervises Circulation, Gov Docs librarian has Econ/Business as a department, etc.  We had a massive weeding project and were all expected to work on our areas and chip in on the “ownerless” sections.

While weeding Sociology I noticed that almost all the books who still had date due slips had checkout stamps on them; some of them circulated quite a bit. Being a smaller institution we couldn’t go with the university “buy all the books” strategy; the sociology librarians of times past were very focused on maintaining a collection that was actually used.

We are a  small high-touch campus. You get to know a lot of the faculty even outside your department and to know “Professor XYZ has the same class very year, and always assigns papers on political history of a particular geographical area and time range”. You get similar questions every year, for years. So if you stumble across a newly published book that could be useful to a student in the class and it’s not in the collection, you might as well buy it even if it’s not in your subject area. Particularly when it’s interdisciplinary, the title may not come up on anybody’s regular notifications. Keeping the students supplied with research material is a team effort.

I feel like my electronic resource work does give way (some) to my other duties but on the other hand, the e-resource work is heavily informed by the public-facing and collection development work. So it’s a balancing act of time and priorities, while at the same time one corner of work enhances all the others. Admittedly, I enjoy selecting (and weeding!) books so this “Let it all go to DDA and packages” philosophy seems rather unpleasant.

Diane Westerfield, Electronic Resources & Serials Librarian
Tutt Library, Colorado College
diane.westerfield at coloradocollege.edu<mailto:diane.westerfield at coloradocollege.edu>
(719) 389-6661
(719) 389-6082 (fax)



From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Karen Jensen
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2017 12:55 PM
Cc: eril-l
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] FW: [EXTERNAL] request for examples of libraries almost entirely non-firm ordering, print and e

Are we seeing a difference in philosophy here due to the nature of the institution? Smaller, wealthier schools maintaining traditional selection methods and favoring print, versus larger state-funded institutions going for the best bang for the buck? It is not inexpensive to have a host of subject librarians selecting printed books title by title, nor cataloging and shelving them, whether they are ever used or not. Much of what we have chosen to do has been driven by financial necessity, but also by patron demand; they want e-books and lots of them, and DDA allows us to make more titles available for consideration - 10 times more titles (or more!) than we could ever dream of acquiring in print. I'm not getting much faculty or student feedback for print; what print requests we receive, we purchase as requested. But the DDA e-book models are much used here, for the reasons stated above.

Karen Jensen
Collection Development Officer
Rasmuson Library
University of Alaska Fairbanks
907-474-6695
kljensen at alaska.edu<mailto:kljensen at alaska.edu>



On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 10:38 AM, Steve Oberg <steve.oberg at wheaton.edu<mailto:steve.oberg at wheaton.edu>> wrote:
This is a good discussion and I just wanted to briefly point out that our library has deliberately chosen _not_ to go in this direction. I realize this is contrary to what Melissa originally asked about. We looked carefully at ebook DDA a few years ago, along with considering how we’d like to handle ebooks vs. print books overall, and concluded that ebook DDA was not well suited to our environment and/or philosophies for collections and user access. So aside from purchasing an occasional large ebook set (think Springer Nature, e.g.), most of our ebooks are individually selected, and we have specific criteria in our collection development policy for when ebooks are preferred rather than print. Put another way, we still prefer print over e in the main for monographs. Our subject librarians make most selections with a few minor exceptions.

The opposite is true for journals, where we prefer e subscriptions and have a big pay-per-view initiative for journal articles that’s going into its sixth year. In addition, we have had a successful print DDA program for a few years now.

Steve

Steve Oberg
Assistant Professor of Library Science
Group Leader for Resource Description and Digital Initiatives
Wheaton College (IL)
+1 (630) 752-5852<tel:(630)%20752-5852>

NASIG Vice-President/President-Elect
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