NEWS
#EbookSOS beyond academia
THE Academic Ebook Investigation cam- paign has put out a call to sectors beyond academia to share their difficulties with ebook access and pricing.
Communicating via a new Jiscmail mailing list, Johanna Anderson, Subject Librarian at the University of Gloucester- shire, who started the campaign, said: “Is there anyone not HE based who wants to write a blog post for our website about the difficulties of ebook access in their sector? Health, FE, Schools, Public. I’m conscious that a lot of the focus is on universities but I know it is even worse elsewhere. I am particularly interested in health libraries.” She added that blogs could be anonymous. l
https://academicebookinvestigation.org/
Lockdown library service value
A TELEPHONE service for lonely and vul- nerable library customers, set up during the first lockdown, delivered a £4 return on every £1 invested, according to the social impact team at accountancy firm Moore Kingston Smith. The research looked at the service – run by Suffolk Libraries with support from Suffolk County Council and the East of England Co-op – between March 2020 and July 2020, when library staff made over 6,700 calls to ‘check in’ on library customers. It cited benefits like “increased feelings of being cared about, valued and of belonging to the community” – for which it provides a financial evaluation.
Resources for 1Lib1Ref
THE #1Lib1Ref campaign will run again from 15 May to 5 June 2021 with the Wiki- media Foundation inviting library staff and their audiences to improve the reliability of sources in Wikipedia. To support this IFLA’s Wikidata and Wikibase Working Group has already run a Train-the-Trainers workshop and is provid- ing resources about how to edit on Wikidata. Videos about using Wikidata and Wikibase in the context of professional library work are available at
https://tinyurl.com/4mufewmk.
Public libraries face existential ebook crisis
“THE profession must know. The profession must act.” These were the last words on the last slide of Stuart Hamilton’s presentation to the 2021 CILIP Ireland/LAI annual Joint Conference. They referred to the ongoing ebook pricing and accessibility crisis. Stuart, who is Head of Libraries Develop-
ment at Local Government Management Agency (LGMA) – responsible for the strategic development of the public library service across Ireland, acknowledges that the price of ebooks in the academic sector has generated new heat and much-need- ed activity. But he says the problem is not confined to academic libraries, adding that initial sampling of Ireland’s public library sector also shows pricing issues:
l Single-user, single copy eBooks are on average 1.8 times the cost of a print book.
l Titles from ‘big’ publishers (PRH, Harper Collins, Macmillan) are on average 2.6 times the cost of a print book.
l Single-user, single copy eAudiobooks are on average 5.7 times the cost of a print book.
While the differential between print
and digital prices may not be as wide as in academic textbooks, the situation in public libraries is still significant. Stuart also sees ebook and ebook access as an equal, if not greater, risk to professional librarians as pric- ing. He said it is a threat that has been around for a long time but it’s importance has only been understood as a result of Covid.
“We are now unable to choose how to develop our collections… why are we being told what we can and cannot buy when we haven’t had that before? In print we can develop collections, that’s the purpose of librarians, to some extent, to buy collections that suit community needs – in the digital world that’s not the case.”
He says Hachette and Amazon won’t make their titles available to public libraries in Ireland at all. And of those titles that are available – via Ireland’s Borrow Box collection – 40 per cent have restrictions on them. “We don’t buy our ebooks we license them, and these licenses impose on us things that we just don’t have to deal with in print, like 26 loans and the thing goes up in smoke and you have to buy it again. If you have it in your collection for a year, the thing goes up in smoke and you have to buy it again. If you want to copy it, good luck to you because you’ll break the DRM (Digital rights management) and I mean even if you’re within your rights, for research purposes. “This is coming to a head, we’ve got some interesting rumbling in the sector going on. In the UK there’s a grassroots movement from the Academic Ebook Investigation folks… and the LAI and CILIP are onboard with this which is great, and CONUL. So we are beginning to get a little movement, but I think we are going to have to do a lot more.”
Grant for cataloguing training
A GRANT has been awarded to Awen Libraries in Bridgend, to develop a bespoke cataloguing training package. It is hoped the package will not only
give library staff at Awen Cultural Trust the skills to make available and easily discoverable the niche and local history items, but also act as a pilot for future cataloguing training for public librarians in Wales. With almost all of the Welsh Library Authorities sharing the same LMS and catalogue records, when one record
10 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
is improved, all Welsh Library Services with that item benefit from increased discoverability. Library Manager at Awen Cultural Trust Harriet Hopkins says: “It has been so gratifying to have our inter- est in developing cataloguing skills within our service taken seriously and supported by CILIP Wales. This is a unique opportunity for professional development for key staff who will really benefit from the knowledge.”
April-May 2021
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