E-books in Academic Libraries

Ksenija Mincic-Obradovic

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781780630502
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Bibliothèques et sciences de l'information

Written from the perspective of a librarian, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the impact of e-books on academic libraries. The author discusses advantages to both researchers and librarians and provides current examples of innovative uses of e-books in academic contexts. This book reviews the current situation in e-book publishing, and describes problems in managing e-books in libraries caused by the variety of purchase models and varying formats available, and the lack of standardisation. It discusses solutions for providing access and maintaining bibliographic control, looks at various initiatives to publicise and promote e-books, and compares e-book usage surveys to track changes in user preferences and behaviour over the last decade. E-books have already had a huge impact on academic libraries, and major advances in technology will bring further changes. There is a need for collaboration between libraries and publishers. The book concludes with reflections on the future of e-books in academic libraries.

• Describes how e-books have changed library services and how they have enabled academic libraries to align with the e-learning initiatives of their universities
• Discusses problems with e-book collection development and management and lists examples of solutions
• Examines trends in user behaviour and acceptance of e-books

1

Introduction

Much has been written about e-books. They are a medium that puzzles and intrigues. Even my local paper has an article about them almost every week. Everyone has an opinion. They have been examined from many angles, by many authors, on many occasions. And yet, there are still more questions than answers in the field.

E-books have been both praised and criticised. Some commentators have predicted that e-books will completely replace print books; others have concluded that e-books are dying. Neither has happened – print and electronic books coexist, and in academic libraries both formats have a place, and complement each other.

In this book, I describe the situation as it is today, hoping that our experiences of the recent past will help libraries and publishers develop a better understanding of e-books, and how this powerful medium can best be used in the academic environment.

The book is based on my own experiences with e-book collections at the University of Auckland Library, as well as on the practices of academic and research libraries as described in the literature. Since e-books first appeared in libraries, hundreds of articles have been written about them, describing how they have been integrated into library collections and giving an excellent overview of the problems libraries have faced. I have been able to refer only to some of them in this book. Where articles have been published in subscription magazines as well as open source repositories I have generally cited the freely available version to allow all my readers to access it.

Many surveys have been conducted on e-books over the last decade. They give a good indication of trends in e-book publishing and e-book usage, and I often make reference to their findings. They have been done by both libraries and publishers, as both are interested in understanding trends in e-book usage.

Daily newspapers, print and electronic, and also forums and blogs such as the MobileRead forum, TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home blog, and The Digital Reader blog, have provided me with excellent information on the latest developments. Many people, keen to test the latest e-book readers, are also happy to share their opinion about them, and they leave posts on blogs, or write longer articles on websites that follow the latest IT developments. They tell us how various e-readers compare in price, size, weight and features, and what their strong and weak points are. Some people even create video recordings of their experiences with e-book readers and post them on video-sharing websites, such as YouTube, allowing a more personal touch.

Companies involved in the e-book market also add valuable posts on their websites. For example, the United States-based company Aptara, which provides digital publishing solutions, closely follows developments in the e-book market.

Most of my own knowledge of e-books comes from my hands-on work with the University of Auckland Library’s e-book collections, and I will often refer to these collections, to the problems that arose and the solutions we found for them.

I started working at the University of Auckland Library as Cataloguing Department manager about the same time as our first e-book collections were purchased. I soon encountered the common issues that accompany e-books. Ever since, together with my colleagues in technical services departments, I have been trying to figure out the easiest and most economic ways of providing access to e-books, and have been adjusting workflows to take account of the changes e-books have introduced. As our collections have grown, the situation has not become any less challenging.

The University of Auckland was established in 1883. It has over 39,000 students and 2,104 FTE¹ academic staff. It is both New Zealand’s largest university and its top-ranked university based on research quality.² The University of Auckland Library is the most extensive Library system in New Zealand and ranks with the top five Australian university libraries. It has 227 FTE staff and serves over 50,000 users.³ The Library has been eager to exploit opportunities offered by new technologies to expand services and support the University’s learning and teaching initiatives. The University Librarian has taken a leading role in ensuring that e-book collections have featured in the Library’s strategic plan. Today, the University of Auckland Library has a world-class collection of electronic resources, together with almost every challenge that accompanies them.

Access to the first e-books was provided in 1998, when the Library bought a new integrated library system (Voyager) which enabled linking from the Library catalogue to an e-resource. The first collection of e-books was bought at the beginning of 2001, and by the end of 2009 the Library had acquired over eighty e-book databases. The Library catalogue currently lists bibliographic records for nearly 350,000 e-books, but unfortunately, not all e-book collections have bibliographic records, and for this reason it is difficult to say what the total number of e-book titles is. E-books now represent almost 20 per cent of all material in the Library catalogue. Spending on e-books is increasing every year; in 2004, it was 3 per cent of a total collections budget of NZ$14,436,000, and in 2009, almost 11 per cent of a total collections budget of NZ$19,516,551.

Holdings of electronic and print monographs added to the Library catalogue since access to the first e-book was provided, are shown in Table 1.1. Figures for electronic and print books are not obtained in the same way, so they are not completely comparable. Figures for e-books are retrieved by a Voyager report, and they represent the number of e-books added to Library collections in a certain year that are still available, while figures for print books represent print books that were added to the collections in the same year, whether they are still available or not. Despite this, the figures clearly show trends in collection development over the past twelve years. In 2003 and 2004 the Library acquired almost twice as many e-books as print books. This was a result of publishers digitising back volumes and the Library acquiring some big collections, including Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Table 1.1

Print and e-book yearly additions to the University of Auckland Library catalogue

Year	E-book titles	Print book titles
2009	30,161	45,225
2008	18,042	40,012
2007	14,321	46,868
2006	66,806	53,488
2005	40,746	50,340
2004	93,905	51,187
2003	81,890	46,757
2002	4,404	43,080
2001	5,261	43,467
2000	29	33,844
1999	3	29,340
1998	279	31,060

This book is written from the point of view of a practitioner, of a librarian who works with e-books literally every day. A significant part of my job is related to e-book metadata – adding new records, checking files sent by vendors and working with vendors and publishers on MARC records. As my job involves providing access to e-books, I also have to answer a steady stream of queries from subject librarians, such as: ‘Why are there records for some collections in the Library catalogue and no records for others?’ ‘Why is this e-book, which has been used as recommended reading for the last two years, suddenly unavailable?’ ‘Are new books added to the collection as part of the entitlement or do they have to be bought separately?’ ‘Is there an easy way to know what titles are part of our e-book collections?’ Often I was unable to give an answer, and, without even noticing it, I became one of that large group of people puzzled by the e-book phenomenon. I started reading about e-books, and searching for answers. This book is the result of those years of monitoring what is happening with e-books.

Several years ago one would often come across predictions that Internet access would make libraries obsolete. However, over the years, the scholarly e-book publishing industry has re-orientated itself towards libraries. Companies serving the academic e-book market have realised that the biggest consumers of scholarly e-book products and services are academic libraries, and they have focused their efforts in that direction. They have come up with a number of solutions specially designed for libraries. Howe...