Evidence Summary
Patron-Driven Acquisition of E-Books Satisfies Users’ Needs While Also
Building the Library’s Collection
A Review of:
Fischer, K. S., Wright, M., Clatanoff,
K., Barton, H., & Shreeves, E. (2012). Give ’em what they want: A one-year study of
unmediated patron-driven acquisition of e-books. College & Research
Libraries, 73(5), 469-492.
Reviewed by:
Giovanna Badia
Liaison
Librarian, Schulich Library of Science and
Engineering
McGill
University
Montreal,
Quebec, Canada
Email:
giovanna.badia@mcgill.ca
Received: 2 Jun. 2013 Accepted: 1 Aug. 2013
2013 Badia.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 2.5 Canada (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by‐nc‐sa/2.5/ca/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial
purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the
same or similar license to this one.
Abstract
Objective – To present the initial
results of an academic library’s one-year pilot with patron-driven acquisition
of e-books, which was undertaken “to observe how user
preferences and the availability of e-books interacted with [the library’s]
traditional selection program” (p. 469).
Design – Case study.
Setting – The University of Iowa, a
major urban research university in the United States.
Subjects – Original selection of
19,000 e-book titles from ebrary at the beginning of
the pilot in October 2009. To curb spending during the pilot, the number of
e-book titles available for purchase was reduced to 12,000 titles at the end of
December 2009, and increased to nearly 13,000 titles in April 2010.
Methods – These e-book titles were
loaded into the library’s catalogue. The goal was for the University of Iowa’s
faculty, staff, and students to search the library catalogue, discover these
e-book titles, and purchase these books unknowingly by accessing them. The
tenth click by a user on any of the pages of an e-book caused the title to be
automatically purchased for the library (i.e., ebrary
charged the library for the e-book).
Main Results – From October 2009 to September 2010, the library
acquired 850 e-books for almost $90,000 through patron-driven acquisition. The
average amount spent per week was $1,848 and the average cost per book was
$106. Researchers found that 80% of the e-books purchased by library patrons
were used between 2 to 10 times in a 1-year period. E-books were purchased in
all subject areas, but titles in medicine (133 titles purchased, 16%),
sociology (72 titles purchased, 8%), economics (58 titles purchased, 7%), and
education (54 titles purchased, 6%) were the most popular. Two of the top three
most heavily used titles were standardized test preparation workbooks. In
addition, 166 of the e-books purchased had print duplicates in the library, and
the total number of times the print copies circulated dropped 70% after the
e-versions of these books were obtained.
The authors also
examined usage data for their subscription to ebrary’s
Academic Complete collection from September 2009 to July 2010, which consisted
of 47,367 e-books. Together with the 12,947 book titles loaded into the
catalogue for the patron-acquisition pilot, there were a grand total of 60,314 ebrary e-book titles in the library catalogue that were
accessible to the Iowa University community. The study revealed that 15% of
these titles were used during this 11-month period, and the used titles were
consulted 3 or more times. The authors sorted the user sessions by publisher
and found that patrons used e-books from a wide variety of publishing houses,
of which numerous university presses together constituted the majority of uses.
The five most heavily used e-books were in the fields of medicine, followed by
economics, sociology, English-American literature, and education.
Conclusion – The authors’ experience has shown that
patron-driven acquisition “can be a useful and effective tool for meeting user
needs and building the local collection” (p. 490). Incomplete
coverage of academic publications makes patron-driven acquisition only one tool
among others, such as selection by liaison librarians, which may be employed
for collection development. According to the authors, patron-driven acquisition
“does a good job of satisfying the sometimes unrecognized demand for
interdisciplinary materials often overlooked through traditional selection
methods,” (p. 491) and alerts librarians to new research areas.
Commentary
This study is not
unique, in that the authors cite other research that investigated patron-driven
acquisition for books, both in print and electronic formats (e.g., Anderson,
Freeman, Hérubel, Mykytiuk,
& Ward, 2010; Bracke, 2010; Price & McDonald,
2009). The authors do not state how this study supports, differs from, or adds
to existing literature on the topic, thereby making it difficult to place it in
its wider research context.
This reviewer used
Glynn’s EBL Critical Appraisal Checklist (2006) to assess the study’s
methodology. An original selection of 19,000 e-book titles from ebrary were loaded into the library’s catalogue at the
beginning of the pilot, but this was reduced to almost 13,000 titles a few
months later in order to curb patrons’ spending. The original inclusion or
exclusion criteria for selecting which e-books should be entered in the
catalogue were not provided, but would have been helpful for readers who wish
to replicate this pilot at their own institutions. This reviewer would also have
liked to know if there were any differences between the MARC records for the
e-books, which were supplied by ebrary and loaded
into the library catalogue as is, and the MARC records for all the other items
in the catalogue. Any differences between the records may have affected the
results, especially the data regarding the uses of the print versus electronic
versions of the same book titles, since one set of records may have contained
more descriptive information that could have been discovered in a search.
This study provides
data to support the idea that patron-driven acquisition of e-books is useful
for collection development, and also offers some details for its
implementation. Taken together, the data and the literature review contained in
this article present a strong case for readers to try patron-driven acquisition
at their own institutions.
References
Anderson, K. J., Freeman, R. S., Hérubel, J-P. V. M., Mykytiuk, L. J.,
Nixon, J. M., & Ward, S. M. (2010). Liberal arts books on demand: A decade
of patron-driven collection development, part 1. Collection Management, 35(3/4),
125-141. doi:10.1080/01462679.2010.486959
Bracke, M. S. (2010). Science and technology books on
demand: A decade of patron-driven collection development, part 2. Collection
Management, 35(3/4), 142-150. doi:10.1080/01462679.2010.486742
Glynn, L. (2006). A critical appraisal tool for library and information research.
Library Hi Tech, 24(3), 387-399. doi:10.1108/07378830610692154
Price, J., & McDonald, J. (2009, Nov.). Beguiled by bananas? A retrospective study of
the usage & breadth of patron vs. librarian acquired ebook
collections. Proceedings of the
Charleston Library Conference, Charleston, SC. doi:
10.5703/1288284314741