FEATURE
E-book aggregators
Aggregators increase options for libraries and publishers
Siân Harris looks at the role of e-book aggregators in providing access to scholarly e-book content
Kari Paulson, ProQuest vice president and general manager, e-books
A
ggregators play a major role in library e-book spending decisions today. This is largely due to the broad selection, access
models and workflow solutions we are able to provide. As processes and workflows around e-books are still forming, aggregators offer time and cost savings by standardising workflows, integrating with various ILS suppliers and enabling libraries to acquire a broad selection of titles, from thousands of publishers, with a common acquisition and management workflow and interface.
Aggregators also offer libraries a great range of choices with different access models available for different subsets of content – whether subscription, upfront purchase or demand- driven acquisition (DDA). Libraries can choose different access models for different content to suit their specific access needs and budgets. We work with most academic publishers and many of these publishers also offer their content through their own platforms. To me, this represents a very healthy market. We want to work in a market where libraries have many choices as to how and where they buy their content. A healthy market full of choice drives innovation, efficiency and ensures that the pricing remains fair.
It will make sense for libraries to buy content directly from publishers where they require a critical mass of content. Publishers can offer very competitive pricing, which will appeal to libraries that buy their content in larger quantities. However, not every library will ever want to work with every publisher out there. Aggregators
20 Research Information APRIL/MAY 2014
restrictions as publishers are loosening DRM on their own platforms. We believe that DRM restrictions will continue to relax as industry standards shift.
Library e-book budgets have been growing
‘The breadth of content has expanded over time, the access models have diversified and the workflows have become more sophisticated’
complement what publishers offer directly. Libraries need both options in order to build the best collections to suit their particular needs. The breadth of content has continued to expand over time, the access models have diversified and the workflows have become more sophisticated. It’s especially true that aggregators are now able to focus on refining workflows and we’re seeing deeper levels of sophistication and integration with ILS systems, discovery services, knowledge bases and other cloud-based management systems. We’ve continued to see a growth in demand. The more e-book titles libraries provide to their users, the more they discover and use. We see increased use on mobile devices as users want to access content where and when they need it. Libraries are putting more pressure on DRM
steadily, but we’ve seen an acceleration of this trend as libraries are increasingly shifting funds from print to electronic acquisition. This shift is driven by a number of factors as users increasingly demand electronic access. It is also driven in part by practical reasons such as increasing pressure on physical space in the library and increasing demand for mobile access. We have seen an increasing number of libraries adding rentals (short-term loans) to their e-book acquisition programmes. This is driven by many factors. One factor is the growing body of evidence that supports short-term loans as a good way to build efficiency into an acquisition programme. They deliver excellent return on investment and an excellent experience for end-users who have more immediate access to a greater choice of content. Short-term loans help libraries ensure that they are paying for and purchasing content that will be used. We’ve also consistently seen that libraries that use short-term loans as part of their e-book acquisition programme grow their e-book budgets, year on year, at a faster rate and tend to have larger e-book budgets overall. This is because short-term loans, as part of an overall acquisition programme, allow libraries to expose their users to a wider selection of content at the outset from a broader, deeper range of publishers than traditionally made available. The wider the selection, the more chance users will find what they are looking for, the greater the demand, and then, of course, the greater the demand, the greater the need… the greater the justification for expanding the budget.
It is an empirically proven, self-perpetuating cycle – and all of that expenditure can be 100
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33