[Eril-l] philosophy about usage in large ebook packages at small institutions

[Melissa Belvadi]

Hello, all.
UPEI is a small (student FTE about 5,100, mostly undergraduate) public university in Canada. We make multidisciplinary package subscription/renewal decisions as a team.

In considering whether to renew a very large ebook subscription package this month, one of our librarians grabbed onto the usage data I provided and noted that we had only used a tiny percentage of the books in it in the last year, as a possible reason not to renew.

I replied to our entire librarian team (there are just 7 of us), with this analysis. I want to share it with you all to see what you think of this, and to get your own thoughts and experiences regarding this issue in your own institutions, especially those of you who are approximately our size. I know the experience and usage patterns at very large institutions (ie. student FTE in the 50,000 range and with lots of PhD programs) is entirely different.

Here's what I wrote to our team about this:

I would strongly discourage all of you from thinking about the value of big ebook subscription packages in terms of what percentage of the total package is used by our patrons. If we applied that percentage thinking to all of our major ebook packages, we'd be cancelling ALL of them because they all look this bad using that metric.

Our patron use of books (this is true for many smaller institutions) is deeply idiosyncratic from year to year.  That is, the overlap of specific titles used in one year bears little resemblance to the list of titles used in the previous year, or the next.  I see this in pretty much all of our big ebook subscription packages, excluding of course the tiny handful of titles being used directly by courses year after year, and we usually try to identify those and buy them outright.

We absolutely cannot predict which titles our patrons will use based on past usage, so casting as wide a net as possible is our best strategy. It's also why we continue to run a DDA program with over 30,000 titles in it even though we never even touch as many as 200 in a single year.

It's also why I push our EBA vendors very hard to give us as large a pool as possible for our deposits, and then further push them to allow us to spend that deposit on books beyond the pool, for instance, books that our COUNTER data reports denials of on their platform that were greater than almost all of the books in the pool (denials means someone from UPEI tried to use a book on their platform that we do NOT have licensed in any way, through purchase or EBA).

Instead, I encourage you to think about the absolute numbers, rather than relative numbers and consider the overall value of the potential access rather than actually accessed. Here are some questions I encourage you to consider:

  *   Is using 340 books good enough for that price generally?
  *   Is the mix of titles/subject coverage and quality of those titles good enough to be worth offering to our patrons as options for them to have?
  *   Would there be something else we could do with that amount of money that would offer a better mix of options for our patrons?
  *   Given the subject coverage, are patrons interested in those subjects sufficiently served by other products we already have (or other options available to them even for free online), or does this fill an important niche in terms of which patrons/depts at UPEI are served by this compared to our other ebook packages?


Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-4433-0189

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