Do the math: PDA not the answer?
Yesterday, we talked about filtering; today, Terry Bucknell suggests, we're looking at the opposite - buying by the bucketful. A multidisciplinary university like Liverpool (where Terry is e-resources manager) buys a wide range of content, for example, 19 ebook packages in 5 years. These have traditionally been bought with leftover budget at the end of the financial year (n.b. Liverpool decided ebook packages are better than journal backfiles here). As "leftover budget" becomes a thing of the past, Terry is analysing the value from these packages in more depth and always considering alternative purchasing models - individual title selection, patron-driven acquisition, etc.. Here are some highlights of Terry's analysis:
- 40% of Liverpool's e-resource usage is e-books - yet 95% of the budget goes on journals.
- Liverpool's usage is typical - approx 40% of titles in a collection are used in the first year; approximately 60% have been used by the second year
- Some subjects (e.g. mathematics, at Liverpool) seem to perform badly - is this a factor of how/when information is used in different disciplines? need to be careful before making collection development decisions based on this data
- All types of books get used at least a bit, but some content (e.g. conference proceedings) is used more than other content (e.g. monographs)
- Pareto principle applies! 80% of downloads from top 21% of ebooks - Terry doesn't think this should be a factor in how collections are purchased / priced. (Looking more closely, 35% of usage on one platform came from one title! - doesn't tell you anything about the broader collection, just that some books are heavily used)
- Even on aggregator platforms (where there's a greater level of individual title selection than a publisher package), a third of ebooks have had only 1 or 2 accesses during 2 years
- With patron-driven acquisition, all ebooks are used (because you don't buy them unless they are) - so should be better value? Terry used ebrary model (purchase triggered by 10 page turns / 10 minutes in a title / copy & pasting / printing) to analyse Liverpool's Springer ebook usage stats and calculated that PDA costs would overtake package costs in just one year in most cases (even when cheaper backfiles were excluded from analysis).
- Evidence from elsewhere (e.g. U Iowa ebrary pilot) also shows that PDA budgets run out quickly - libraries who started trials had to resort to buying packages after all
- ... other PDA models are available ... (and may show different results) but Terry found that a PDA model would have to allow for "6 chapters free" before it would be comparable to package pricing.
- Some packages are better value than others, and libraries should prioritise these in collections
- Aggregated databases give cheap critical mass
- Single title selections are important for core texts
- PDA can fill the gaps, but not form the foundations
- Need to centralise book budgets - stop fragmenting by formats etc - a hard sell for lots of faculty / librarians
- Rapid move to e-only book acquisition - implications for logistics / staffing
- Packages need to be at least 50% discount for it to be worth it for the library - make it a "no brainer" (70% discount) for the library to purchase, and you'll solve the budget crisis
- Offer combined books / journals packages with appropriate cost weighting / discounting.
Labels: analysis, database, ebooks, model, package, pda, purchasing, uksg
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For those of you who loved Terry's slides, you can take a look at them (and learn about the tool he used to create them) at http://bit.ly/dSfGpO
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