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

[Amy Lynn Fry]

Our overall circulation is falling, like every other library’s (that I know of). That doesn’t mean that the books we buy now aren’t useful – I know they are, because they are being checked out. That’s why I looked at the use of recently-purchased print collections and the use of ebooks acquired during the same time period. If I am buying a bunch of books that aren’t getting used, then, yes, I don’t want to buy them – not on firm order, not on approval. That isn’t what’s happening at our institution. Here, most of our print books were used, and most of our ebooks weren’t, so that gave us a clear indication of where our money was best spent. If the books we bought thirty years ago don’t circulate, we can weed according to our statewide plan and put other titles in storage – it doesn’t save us any money now. So overall circ stats are less relevant for my current book buying than the circ stats of recently purchased books.

I wrote about all of this in College & Research Libraries: http://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/16613

Like I said, I plan to pull this data and look at it again. I know our ebook uses go up every year, but haven’t looked to see if more titles have been used. It is possible that usage patterns for print and e are changing.

Amy Fry
Electronic Resources Coordinator
Jerome Library
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH 43403
419.372.2690
afry at bgsu.edu<mailto:afry at bgsu.edu>
personal.bgsu.edu/~afry

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Karen Jensen
Sent: Friday, May 12, 2017 6:46 PM
Cc: eril-l
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] FW: [EXTERNAL] request for examples of libraries almost entirely non-firm ordering, print and e

Amy, a question in response to your post. Are your print circulation use statistics really going up and not down? We are finding that patrons simply aren't asking for printed books, period. Just when I think use will level off (at a very low level compared to 10, 15, 20 years ago) it drops again. We are still getting print books, but they aren't really wanted.

By contrast, ebook use is still increasing, especially as we add more "evidence based" models. Faculty frequently comment on how helpful it is to have so much available in electronic format. It could be that only 10% of what is available to them is being used, but when there are hundreds of thousands of ebooks available to our patrons, far more than we could ever purchase in print, it's far better than what we are seeing in print use. I'm not offering 10% as any official measure,  just using your figure. I was monitoring it for a while, but no longer have time to do even that. You're right, comparing use is apples and oranges, but a full 1/3 of our print collection has never been used, ever, and that was money spent. The unused e-books cost us almost nothing.

I would love to sit around selecting print books. That will probably never happen again in any significant way. I love to look through those we do receive. Oh the days when - long before I began my library career - librarians had time to cut out newspaper book reviews and paste them into the covers of their acquisitions! If anyone wants to offer me a job to do that, give me a ring!

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



On Fri, May 12, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Amy Lynn Fry <afry at bgsu.edu<mailto:afry at bgsu.edu>> wrote:
I would just like to jump in to this conversation briefly.

I’m at a very middle of the road mid-sized public university. I looked very carefully at the use of our firm ordered and approval books and compared it to the use of our ebook collections acquired during the same period of time, and data here just do not support moving to ebooks. If my goal for the monographic information we have available to people is for it to get used, then print books are a better purchase. Far more titles we buy in print get used than ebooks do.

In looking closely at published studies of the use of ebooks (I’m pretty confident I looked at all the published studies), most showed that about 10% of the ebooks made available to users ever get used. These studies were a mix of DDA and other kinds of packages. People tend to get distracted by the high number of “uses” ebooks get, but it’s important to remember that uses are a mixed bag – you’re mostly shown number of page impressions and that kind of thing, where you would expect a high number. In reality, in most instances, not many titles get much use. Some people get excited about how much money they save by doing DDA – I get sad when I hear that, because what it really means is that library’s users just aren’t using books. And part of the reason often is that most people really don’t want to use ebooks, so if that’s all you have your users may go elsewhere.

It is difficult intellectual work to be a good selector, but not impossible, and with the potential low rate of ebook use you’re almost certain to beat it even doing a bad job selecting print – if what’s important is getting monographic information into the minds of readers and not just spending as little as possible.

I do feel like I go against the industry when I say things like this, but I get my opinion from a careful study of all the data available to me. I am about to update all my data, something I’m dreading a little because it was so hard to pull together. Maybe ebooks are increasing in popularity at my institution now. Maybe 75% of our print books are no longer circulating. I’m open to changing my approach to collection development. But I think in the case of ebooks librarians have erred more on the radical approach in order to get rid of the work of selecting, and don’t really have data that supports it being best for users. Most of the newer librarians I work with have no interest in selecting, not even when it’s part of their job. That makes me sad. The less of our collection is well-selected and usable, the less relevant it becomes, and the less relevant the library as an institution becomes.

I am not against all ebook purchasing or all ebook plans, lest you want to accuse me of doing that. My data and knowledge makes me good at making good decisions about ebooks. Right now I am all about moving ebook money towards EBA plans with the best platforms and university press content – Project MUSE, JSTOR and Oxford’s University Press Scholarship Online are the best value and will get the most use. But moving to e is really not right for every institution.

Amy Fry
Associate Professor, E-resources Librarian
Jerome Library
Bowling Green, OH 43403
afry at bgsu.edu<mailto:afry at bgsu.edu>
email is the best way to reach me

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org>] On Behalf Of VanUllen, Mary K
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2017 3:03 PM
To: eril-l <eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>>

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

At the University at Albany, a larger, public institution, we do some of both.  We tend to find that students in most disciplines generally much prefer print books to ebooks.  In an ideal world, they’d like to have access to both, but we can’t afford that

--Mary


Mary K. Van Ullen
Director of Collections
University Library, LI-328
University at Albany
1400 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY  12222
(518) 442-3559<tel:(518)%20442-3559>



From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Karen Jensen
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2017 2:55 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<tel:(907)%20474-6695>
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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