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.

Experiments like this can give libraries and publishers an idea of what is a fair price to pay for an ebook package; Terry's conclusions:

• 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

The implications for libraries:

• 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

The implications for publishers:

• 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.

July issue of Serials now published

The Editorial Board of Serials thought it would be a good exercise to alert blog readers to the new issue of Serials which has just been published and contains many of the popular presentations from the recent conference (including T Scott Plutchak's and Melinda Kenneway's highly regarded papers). We've also included some of the breakout sessions, including Paul Harwood's briefing on the UK consortia landscape with a guide for librarians, publishers and intermediaries, and Nol Verhagen's briefing on "the licensing battlefield" from a consortium perspective.

Other papers concern the scholarly community in China, e-textbooks, the usage factors project, journal collection evaluation and much more..

Read it here (subscription or members only for current three issues) - http://uksg.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=issue&issn=0953-0460&volume=20&issue=2
Subscription information here: http://www.uksg.org/serials/subscribe

Let us know what you think!

E-books: plugging and playing in Toronto

"E-books have become my new passion," says Warren Holder, University of Toronto Libraries. Toronto's recent focus on e-books has been motivated by demand from users, from faculty (more in medicine? but also in social sciences) and also from students, who have grown up with the web and expect its immediacy and simplicity (Holder, like earlier speaker Tom Davy, also played video clips of students talking about their research habits: "The physical library? no ... I get out of there as quickly as I can."). Other factors included:

• inter-campus borrowing (increasing, and less cumbersome electronically)
• high-usage of short term loan content
• the need for new acquisition models.

Furthermore, U Toronto's existing subscriptions to e-book packages show that electronic use is more than print use in 58% of cases where a book exists in both formats.

So the University of Toronto - listening to its Google generation - decided "it behooves us to create a single interface to our e-books ... most students don't care who the publisher is, or even whether it's a journal article or a chapter of a book - they just want the content. We want them to be able to plug and play with one search." They are piloting their own platform to host their 20,000 e-books from 5 major publishers (and, longer term, their journals and A&I content). The platform will only contain the content to which the university has access (I do find myself wondering - perhaps unreasonably - if this doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater: avoiding the frustration of non-licensed dead ends, but at the same time restricting students' view of the wider literature?)

U Toronto's analysis of various usage statistics from its pilot platform is beginning to indicate how students and faculty are using the content, and they intend to begin logging and analysing referring links and navigation between books. Again, current usage patterns across days of the week or months of the year reflects that seen for other types of content (which I take as good evidence that users are format agnostic). Interestingly, reading patterns within ebooks indicate different types of user with different habits (e.g. some read front and then skip to back, others read about half and then skip...), whilst reviewing the evolving top 10 lists demonstrates a real depth and breadth to the range of e-books being used.

During questions, Don Chvatal from Ringgold mentioned the received wisdom that 90% of books in academic libraries are used only once every 10 years, and asked how this would affect U Toronto's e-book purchasing. Holder responded that content is purchased for future possible views, and that such statistics can only become available after you've bought the book. "Our responsibility now", he added, "is to build critical mass, and we're currently getting some good prices for e-books that won't necessarily be available longer-term."