Abstract
Purchas on demand is an emerging e-book collection development model that can help academic libraries satisfy their patrons' changing needs. In this session, Jonathan Nabe and Andrea Imre of Southern Illinois University Carbondale described their implementation of a purchase-on-demand e-book collection developed on MyiLibrary, with content from Ingram's Coutts Information Service, and then they analyzed the pros and cons of this collection development model. Benefits include lower cost-per-title and higher usage rates; challenges include avoiding duplication of print titles and adapting to restrictions in license agreements.
Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) entered into a purchase-on-demand acquisition agreement for MyiLibrary e-books through a combination of “fortune and philosophy,” according to Jonathan Nabe and Andrea Imre. The two SIUC librarians shared their library's experiences with this emerging collection development model in this tactics session. Like their counterparts at many academic libraries, SIUC librarians faced declining collections budgets and wanted to ensure that they purchased items with demonstrated user demand. They sought to shift from buying “on speculation”—a traditional just-in-case collection development model—toward a just-in-time or patron-driven model. Their opportunity arrived in 2008 when MyiLibrary made an offer to SIUC's purchasing consortium, the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA). Accepting the offer meant embarking on a multi-stage implementation process involving (1) licensing, (2) selecting titles, (3) importing machine-readable cataloging (MARC) records to establish a pool of available titles in the library catalog, (4) invoicing as the titles were purchased on demand, and (5) assessing the effectiveness of the collection on an ongoing basis.
As Imre explained, e-book licenses contain several frequent points of contention, including restrictions on the number of simultaneous users permitted and the amount of material that can be downloaded, printed, or saved at one time. These restrictions are usually enforced by delivering content through proprietary websites utilizing Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. E-book licenses also tend to restrict interlibrary loan, coursepack compilation, and course reserve rights more frequently than e-journal licenses. Imre advised audience members to be clear on license terms and the impact of DRM before signing an e-book contract. SIUC benefited from consortial membership by negotiating an increased number of click-throughs required to purchase a given e-book.
GWLA's offer required participants to place a minimum amount on deposit with MyiLibrary at signing; this deposit would become a running account balance, to be charged as patrons initiated purchase of desired titles. SIUC used end-of-year funds from all collection development areas to meet the requirement. In response to an audience member question, Nabe explained that there was no cap on the deposit and that SIUC only needed to contribute additional funds twice. When they ran out of funds once, they executed a temporary script that automatically suppressed the MARC records of e-books available for purchase until they could add money to the account. This prevented users from encountering the error messages that they would have otherwise seen if they tried to open a non-purchased title while the library's account was depleted.
After negotiating the license and depositing funds for purchases, the next step was for collection development librarians to create a title list of the initial pool of e-books that would be available for users to read and purchase through the library catalog. MyiLibrary offered access to a Coutts collection of 230,000 titles from more than one hundred publishers. To customize this collection for their users' needs, SIUC librarians filtered this collection based on multiple factors including price, year of publication, publisher name, Library of Congress classification, and readership level. After the initial selection, they used OASIS (Coutts' ordering service) to add newly published titles to the pool as desired.
An initial set of approximately nine thousand MARC records was batch-loaded into the SIUC catalog in 2008. Before the load took place, a cataloger analyzed the batch of MARC records, identified problems, and corrected them with MarcEdit or local scripts. Records for newly published books arrive in periodic update loads, and library staff can periodically refresh existing MARC records according to the selection list, although Imre noted during the question and answer session that they have only performed this process once.
With MARC records loaded and corrected, patrons are free to discover e-books in the catalog and view them by clicking a link which takes them to the book's cover page, where they can read an abstract and click on the “Open Now” link providing access to the full text. Upon the third time that the full text content of an e-book is viewed, the title is automatically ordered, the price is charged against the deposit account, and the item is added to a monthly invoice sent from MyiLibrary. Library acquisitions staff use the invoices to create purchase records for budgeting and tracking purposes.
SIUC currently has 8,453 e-books in their MyiLibrary collection. At the end of the contract period, if SIUC elects not to renew their subscription, they will lose access to the pool of available e-books and need to remove those MARC records, but access to purchased titles will remain through the catalog.
According to Nabe, e-books provide librarians with a wealth of assessable data. MyiLibrary delivers invoices and Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) compliant usage reports, so it is easy to run cost-per-use calculations. It also logs the unique IP addresses of visitors, although Nabe noted in response to an audience question that IP addresses are not associated with individual user account names, so patron reading habits are kept confidential.
Nabe reported assessment data showing that a wide variety of users were making significant use of e-books, and on-demand ordering was more cost effective than traditional book buying. Between November 2008 and April 2010, SIUC purchased 16,893 print books and users initiated the purchase of 470 e-books. An additional 1,116 e-books were viewed, but not often enough to trigger purchase. Of the 470 purchased e-books, 235 were used after initial purchase, and an average of ninety-five pages were viewed per book, suggesting in-depth use of purchased titles. IP address logs showed 748 unique IP addresses accessing the collection, suggesting it was used by a diverse range of patrons. This did not count a large number of off-campus users all connecting through the address belonging to the library proxy server. The average cost-per-title was $115.30, which Nabe considers to be quite reasonable. Social science, engineering, and general science were the most viewed subject areas. He noted that ninety-one e-books duplicated print books already in the collection, and these e-books cost on average twice as much as their paper counterparts. However, he argued that the benefits of remote access, OpenURL linking, annotation capabilities, and demonstrated demand justified the extra cost. He noted that print books purchased during this time period circulated an average of 0.33 times, and 77 percent of the titles had yet to circulate. These figures were deceptively low, as funds were only made available to buy most of the books late in fiscal year 2010, but the data still corroborate other statistics showing that half of SIUC print titles do not circulate. By contrast, on-demand models, where a user request triggers purchase, by definition yield a 100 percent circulation rate.
Finally, Nabe suggested that investments in e-books could create workflow and staffing savings. He estimated that traditional print orders required SIUC acquisitions staff to spend five minutes per item; ordering, invoicing, and payment occur automatically for e-books purchased on demand. Libraries like SIUC that do not buy shelf-ready books can also save their usual opening, checking in, binding, and labeling processes. Nabe cited a study finding that the average cost of shelving was $4.26 per book per year; using this estimate, the 470 e-books purchased already were saving SIUC $2,000 per year, assuming that MyiLibrary was fulfilling its responsibility for preserving the content.
Nabe and Imre noted several drawbacks and unresolved challenges to purchase-on-demand e-book models, including discovery, title duplication, and licensing issues. Imre noted that patrons must rely on the local catalog to discover these e-books, since MyiLibrary does not allow their pool of e-books to be indexed in Google. Furthermore, their imported MARC records do not contain Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) numbers to allow catalogers to easily update SIUC holdings on WorldCat once items are purchased. In response to an audience question, Imre explained that she has asked MyiLibrary to work with OCLC to address the problem. Imre added that she plans to enable OpenURL access soon, now that their link resolver, SFX, has added MyiLibrary's titles to its knowledgebase.
Many libraries wish to avoid duplicating the same title in print and online formats, but in an on-demand model it is possible for patrons to trigger purchase of an item already owned in print, as well as for librarians to order a print book whose electronic counterpart is already available but not yet purchased. SIUC initially relied on International Standard Book Number (ISBN) matching to avoid duplicating print titles in the first MARC batch load, but some duplicate titles failed to match because the two records had different format-specific ISBNs. SIUC next sent a file of print titles for MyiLibrary to load into OASIS, to help subject selectors identify which e-books had already been purchased. Even after this solution, Nabe noted that patrons are still triggering duplicate orders of print books. Imre observed that ISBN linking appears to be a problem for many e-book vendors, and encouraged them to include as many ISBNs as possible in their MARC records to facilitate matching and de-duplicating. She also touched on the possibility of duplication across multiple e-book platforms, explaining that SIUC removed MyiLibrary titles that overlapped with other e-book collections they had acquired.
According to Imre, many of the issues complicating the decision to buy e-books are related to licensing. She observed that e-book vendors rarely support preservation initiatives, like Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) or Portico, that are gaining momentum with e-journal publishers. She also noted that where libraries and vendors often worked together to resolve access breaches for e-journals, DRM allows e-book vendors to remedy a breach unilaterally by cutting off access. The trigger event could be something as simple as a class of students browsing an e-book faster than is permitted. To implement DRM, many e-book vendors require users to view content in proprietary websites that may not be optimized for users with disabilities or using mobile devices. Imre noted that these trends conflict with established patron demands for access to content anytime and anywhere. DRM technology exists to uphold clauses in license agreements stipulating factors such as the amount of content that users can access or the number of simultaneous users allowed. Imre remarked that some vendors are unwilling to remove these clauses during negotiation, claiming their legal departments will not accept the change. She encouraged librarians to adopt a tough negotiating stance and be willing to decline offers, citing Angela Riggio and Bonnie Tijerina's NASIG presentation on the University of California at Los Angeles' policy of turning down e-book packages whose licenses prohibited coursepack use.Footnote 1 She also advised collective support for interlibrary lending, a staple library service facing challenges in an increasingly electronic era. E-journal license agreements sometimes require staff to print out articles for Ariel delivery, and e-book lending is almost nonexistent due to technical as well as licensing limitations.
Discussion of the multiple-user problem resumed during the question and answer session, as a publisher representative explained that vendors were aware of the need for multiple simultaneous users, but early concerns that this would overtax vendors' systems led to the current convention of single-user access. Audience members contributed factors such as the length and readability of a text that determine how long a given user keeps it open and affect the likelihood of turnaways. Other audience members inquired about SIUC's support for e-book purchasing across disciplinary lines, added to Nabe's statistics on print circulation rates, and delved into details such as what action constituted a user click-through. The enthusiastic response suggested that while the road to demand-driven acquisitions may be bumpy in its early stages, many librarians are interested in “letting the patron drive.”
Notes
1. Angela Riggio and Bonnie Tijerina (presenters) and Eleanor Cook (recorder), “Don't Pay Twice! Leveraging Licenses to Lower Student Costs,” Serials Librarian 60, no. 1–4 (2011): 153–157.