FEATURE
E-books Libraries learn to love
Research librarians around the world like providing e-books but many challenges remain. Siân Harris finds out why
F or many years students and
researchers used computers to access journals but still had to make the journey to their institution library to search out books on the shelves. The uptake of e-books in recent years has changed that, of course, and now e-books form a significant part of the collection plans of librarians in universities and elsewhere. ‘We have a policy to purchase the digital version of a book, if one is available, unless a library patron specifically requests the print version,’ noted Mark England, collection development librarian at the University of Utah, USA.
This story is echoed elsewhere in the world and in different types of
institution. ‘Our
college library is changing acquisition policies in line with modern trends. From the coming year onwards, we are going to devote 20 to 30 per cent of our acquisition budgets towards purchasing
e-books,’ said Gurpreet Singh
Sohal, librarian at GGD SD College Library in India. ‘In our acquisitions, we are going to follow required reading lists and purchase e-books that are prescribed in the syllabus as essential reading.’
Such shifts in acquisition plans have an effect on the make-up of collections. Terry Bucknell, electronic resources manager at the University of Liverpool, UK, pointed out that his library has around two million print books and a couple of hundred thousand e-books –
12 Research Information APR/MAY 2013
but that the print collection has been built up over centuries whereas the growth in e-books has only been in the last few years. ‘Our collection management policy does say that, all things being equal, we’d prefer e to p,’ he added.
Buying e-books
Although there are many trends in the shifts from print to electronic, the details of how they are purchased vary between libraries. There are many ways that e-books can be purchased, and different libraries have different priorities. Sales directly from publishers are often in the form of collections of e-books – analogous to the journal big deal. These give libraries large bodies of content but little control over which books they get, and many titles may never be used.
‘We have a policy to purchase the digital version of a book, unless a library patron specifically
requests the print version’ Mark England, University of Utah, USA
Many libraries now favour patron-driven acquisition (PDA) or demand-driven acquisition (DDA), where e-books are acquired at the request of patrons. These should ensure that all the books purchased are used but tend to work out more expensive per book than the large collections. PDA also comes in many flavours, with different ways of triggering purchases or rental.
At the University of Liverpool the preference is for e-books packages and single titles as requested by users, according to Liverpool’s Bucknell. The approach for the
E-books
single titles is essentially ‘manual PDA’. ‘The level of requests is very modest because we subscribe to ebrary and lots of collections,’ he said. ‘We’ve never gone live with PDA. We’d prefer users make use of the books we already subscribe to and we would also want to make sure we don’t put books into PDA that we already have.’
He also commented on the package purchase approach: ‘With some packages we realised we had made a bad decision, so did not buy more of those packages. However, you can’t decide whether a package is good until you’ve had it at least a year. There is so little consistency at a book level, year by year. ‘The ebrary Academic Complete collection that we’ve subscribed to for many years is fantastic value. Three quarters is never used but I don’t care because for the quarter that is used we get good value.’
The University of Utah takes a different approach. ‘Some e-books are purchased on standing order or on approval. Some are selected by patrons or librarians and firm ordered. Some are purchased as collections. Most are acquired as part of DDA programmes. We have multiple DDA programmes,’ commented England. ‘We can make available for researchers a large number of books at a low cost. These costs will increase as the number of books in our catalogue grows and as the number of books that have short-term loans becomes greater, but DDA programmes are still less expensive and offer more value to library users and to society than approval programmes.’
Pralhad Jadhav, manager of knowledge management and library at Khaitan & Co., in India, also favours title-by-title choice of books. ‘Most licences for e-book packages give librarians no control over the titles included in the package. Vendors are free to add or remove titles during the term of the agreement, often
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