Last month, we issued a call for papers for a special issue of Collection Management on “Imaging the Future of the Academic Library” with guest editor, Michael Levine-Clark, Dean of Libraries at the University of Denver. I am happy to report that the call has been overwhelming successful. We have had over 50 abstracts submitted on topics such as open access, student textbooks, the importance of print, the importance of the subject selector, patron-driven acquisition and demand-driven acquisition, big deals, and even specialty topics such as engineering standards. We have just begun the selections process and plan to have some case studies and commentaries as well as research articles. Our expected publication date is next spring, between April and July, 2019. Collection Management’s new editorial board will be called upon for the peer-review work of these articles. For a list of the newly expanded editorial board please go to http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=editorialBoard&journalCode=wcol20.
This issue has two peer-reviewed articles and two editor-reviewed articles in the column, “Tools of the Trade” and one guest book review.
The first peer-reviewed article by Simona Tabacaru, “E-Preferred Approval Plan at a Large Academic Library” is a statistical analysis of the print and e-books purchased at Texas A&M University after the implementation of an e-preferred approval plan. They were looking to see if more e-books than print books were purchased after an e-preferred plan was implemented, and if the e-books purchased on the plan were used more than print books. They ask several questions: have use rates been maintained or declined? How does use compare by subject areas? How does approval plan book usage compare with firm order titles? These are all questions we would like to study in our own libraries, so their methodology might be repeated for a comparison study. Also reading about the results of the TAMU study might be a clue to what is happening at your library. A quick look at the results indicates that print books still represent the bulk of the monograph purchases, partly because publishers are reluctant to release new titles in both formats simultaneously. And consistent with other studies, use rate of e-books is higher than of print books: 49% vs. 39%. Although many subject areas show high use rates of both formats, they have seen a decline in the e-book use in the last two years, take a look at the article and the tables for more details.
The second peer-reviewed article, “Citation and Citation Metrics in a Serial Management using Masters’ Theses” by Gregory Timms, is an analysis of citations in 72 master’s theses to determine serial use. The students were all marine biology graduate students at the Marine Resources Library at the South Caroline Marine Resources Center. One take-away from this study, which is also consistent with research on library resource usage in other studies, is that the students frequently cite serials in disciplines beyond marine biology. So interdisciplinary considerations are an important collection development issue and Interlibrary Loan services are still critical. However, the author, Gregory Timms, did identify a core of 123 titles.
In this issue, we are including two editor-reviewed articles in the “Tools of the Trade” column. The first one describes innovative use of a resource we readily have available for an inexpensive price: student employees. In “Leveraging Student Employee Expertise for Collection Projects,” the authors, Karen Reiman-Sendi, Christopher Barnes, and Pamela J. MacKintosh, describe several projects at the University of Michigan that use library student employees. The projects described are achievable in a short-time period, make the most of student employee’s interests, and produce outcomes that help the library. They include outreach, such as create a book display; gathering patron input, such as asking student what they are reading; collection evaluation; developing LibGuides; weeding and selection projects. And for all those librarians evaluating databases for cancellation or renewal, in the second column article Alana Nuth describes a scorecard used at the University of Vermont to concisely gather the information needed for renewal decisions in “Consistent, Holistic, and Objective: Using a Scorecard for Electronic Resource Evaluation and Renewal Decision-Making.” The criteria are: Need: does the resource support research and the curriculum; Content & Scope: how unique in the content; Liaison Ranking; and Usage Data.
This issue closes with a book review of The Dynamic Library: Organizing Knowledge at the Sitterwerk–Precedents and Possibilities by a guest book reviewer, Sarah Huber. The system for organizing books at Sittewerk is similar to smart shelving in libraries where RFID technology is used to detect returned books, making them immediately available. Huber sees it is a look at the future of organizing library collections.
The editors would like to the acknowledge an error in the printed volume 43/2 of Collection Management. (2018 The article by Bharat Mehra and Abbey Elder, “Benefits to Collection Development Librarians from Collaborating with ‘Community-Embedded’ Librarians-In-Training” was mislabeled as a “Tools of the Trade” column. It was an Original Research Article. The article by Thomas L. Reinsfelder and Caitlin A. Pike, “Using Library Funds to Support Open Access Publishing through Crowdfunding: Going Beyond Article Processing Charges,” should have been labeled as the “Tools of the Trade” column.
Purdue University
[email protected]
Susanne K. Clement
University of New Mexico
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.