Anti-acquisitions librarians in the era of economic downsizing

Jill Emery started the perspective of the University of Texas Libraries with the comment that 'anti-acquisitions' isn't necessarily about cuts, it can be about core collection development, which is much more positive message. What's essential to the library service to keep in-house?

Jill posed a model of collection development based on four levels:

• Core collections: essential, won't be cut (including some big deals ,when tied to consortia access)
• Librarian selected content: small funds mostly based on endowment accounts and linked to specific subject areas
• Patron selected content: mostly in the area of e-books at present, although also encompassing some rush print orders coming from the ILL request system
• Print-on-demand content: as POD expands, this may become more of an option for supplying out of print content

Texas have also been developing “disapproval” plans, telling vendors actively what they don't want to buy, which is leading to a more granular selection of approval plan stock, and they are considering separating out approval plans and e-notifications (slip plans).

Book acquisitions are the target for a group of big US universities, who want patron driven purchasing of both print and electronic books. E-book vendors are on the whole nearly there, but it's further behind for print, although the fact that print is still coming out before the e-version in many cases means there still needs to be the option.

For patron driven acquisitions, there needs to be set thresholds for purchase and cost, and it also needs interoperable vendor systems and LMS (something which is improving). Texas' experience does show that brief MARC records are OK: they find that users manage to find books and reserve them before they've come in, even just from basic title and author information.

Texas held a pilot project on patron driven article access, but felt that the level of customization wasn't good enough to go further, eg in terms of branding and making sure it was clear access was provided by the university. Other US libraries have moved further in this direction.

Print on demand is “lurking in the background”: their campus bookshop has brought an Expresso book machine, primarily for textbooks, but it opens up new options. Texas are finding that even new books coming in on approval plans are starting to be print on demand copies.

Dana Walker from University of Georgia Libraries was unfortunately unable to attend the conference in person to present Georgia's work on journal management.

University of Georgia faced a significant budget shortfall in 2008, so were forced to re-negotiate some deals and bring in selective pay per view. They also looked closely at usage statistics data, cost per use, cancellation restrictions, ISI impact factors and aggregator availability for all subscriptions (a task complicated by the difficulties in matching ISSNs between usage data and subscription data, so they ended up with a “family” of ISSNs for each journal).

After the initial work, Georgia decided that they needed to create a web based application, more dynamic than spreadsheets, if it was to be used for on-going decision making. They created their own “journal list” bringing together data from multiple sources using WinPerl which allowed them to, eg, connect orders with cost data and usage data, jump to entries in OPAC and e-journals A-Z, produce alerts if journal is non-cancellable, link to ISI impact factors etc. Their next step was to add licence information. The Georgia “Journal list” is effectively a home-grown ERMS, but based around collection development needs, and making decisions about renewals and cancellations, rather than a focus solely on lifecycle management. Interestingly the university had previously purchased a commercial ERM, as part of a consortial deal, but never implemented it due to the time costs of populating it with data [!].

Simplifying e-book acquisition at the University of Surrey

Kate Price, standing in for colleague Laura Smithson, described to us the re-engineering of the University of Surrey's e-book acquisitions process.

Background
U Surrey is quite innovation / research oriented so spends a lot of money on e-resources - mostly e-journals. They have about 90,000 e-books at the moment - another 100,000 if you count Early English Books Online.

• 650 purchased in the last year
• 2500 purchased individually (!! - surprising to me) - these usually come from the same funds as a printed book
  
• Packages are usually funded from the same funds as databases

Experiences of e-books
Kate asked us all to discuss our e-book experiences with our neighbours. I chatted with a sales rep from Gale who talked about the difficulties relating to multiple different e-book platforms, and the relevance of different levels of technology penetration. Kate recaptured our attention by asking us to shout out about things we had learned that had surprised us: nothing had! We are all struggling with the same issues.

She then asked us to discuss e-book ordering processes, before quizzing us about whether we found these satisfactory ... no-one did.

Changing processes
In the past, e-book acquisitions at Surrey were strangely paper-oriented and encompassed a number of delays. With budgets being squeezed, re-engineering was necessary to introduce efficiencies - using an aggregator to reduce the number of places to search. Crucially, the aggregator shares pricing upfront, and ordering / fulfilment via EDI means that data is on the LMS from the outset, saving much time and effort.

• Liaison librarians can log in to locate and mark the book up for ordering (essentially, adding titles to a shopping cart)
• the acquisitions staff will then log in to process the orders, either as batches or (when urgent) as standalone orders
• the data is then output as a spreadsheet (and the user can select which fields this should contain) for import into the LMS
• each item will appear as "not yet active - item is on order", so that users know access is imminent.
  

The LMS is a crucial part of the chain, through which orders are made and paid. "We print off the invoice as proof of purchase, because we don't trust e-books to stay there." The ordering, receipting, quality checking processes now take about 2 hours per week for 25 e-books.

[Surrey uses Coutts Oasis and Talis Prism but points out (true BBC style) that "other EDI order suppliers and LMS systems are available".]

Top tips and checklists
Kate (or perhaps Laura) has put together handouts with checklists; tips include:

• ask your e-book supplier to match your current stock against their available e-books when you start building your e-book collection, and get them to notify you when an e-book is available for a print book that you order - particularly good to do this for e.g. short-loan collections
  
• training, training, training - help sheets, screenshots, get the supplier in - ensure staff are familiar with the system
• establish workflows that suit your set up
• give everyone their own login (this can help to ensure e.g. they use the correct fund codes, as these can be configured only to appear for certain people)
• test, test, test
• integrate e-book ordering into the normal workflow - not something different or new
• establish processes e.g. quality checking, usage statistics, wishlists, customer support

"We'd like a lot more e-books to be published!"
Next steps for Surrey include

• embedding procedures for purchasing from non-EDI-enabled publishers
• introducing paperless processes for print book purchasing
• agreeing policy on purchasing e-versions
• patron-driven purchasing?

Future improvements Surrey would like to see include:

• Improved online selection and ordering
• Improved availability of e-books
• Easier login to individual titles
• Better mobile useability
• Reduced DRM
• Better understanding of learning needs e.g. multiple downloads, flipping pages, copying - "they need to do all of these things to learn effectively. Why publish an academic work if they can't use it do what they need to do?"