E-books in Libraries: An Update

The College of Charleston's Addlestone Library has made e-book access a focus of its collection recently, more than quadrupling e-book holdings over the last five years. The library now offers users access to over 400,000 unique e-book titles across a multitude of disciplines and publishers. Gaining access to e-book collections has not been difficult, especially as the library's consortium is now heavily invested in providing cost-effective e-book subscriptions to member institutions. The consortium provides access to multiple major e-book packages including ebrary’s Academic Complete Collection, Springer Link, and a comprehensive e-book DDA program with EBL. The library also has multiple e-book subscriptions at the institutional level, including a DDA plan through ebrary, Safari Books Online, Digital Loeb, and individual title purchases.

The real challenge has been organizing and maintaining these disparate e-book collections, spread across multiple platforms and with different access and DRM restrictions. The solution staff discovered to managing e-book collections is loading title-level bibliographic records for each book into the catalog and discovery layer, and including administrative metadata about the licensing details of the title. This allows staff to easily identify the provider and level of access for each e-book title, and by using a standardized note they are able to group and manipulate records of similar titles in their integrated library system.

This presentation will discuss the role of administrative metadata in organizing and maintaining multiple e-book collections, and explain why metadata should be a focus of the ongoing discussion of the use of e-books in libraries.

Tom West will share his thoughts and data on the various subscription platforms that the Brazoria County Library System uses to provide e-books and other digital materials for its patrons such as Freading/Freegal, Hoopla, and Total Boox. He will analyze the cost-benefit as compared to the leading one-copy, one-user platforms, OverDrive and 3M Cloud Library.

Attendees will learn about the Texas State Library's Talking Book Program (TBP). The presenter will explain who qualifies, how to apply, and how libraries can take advantage of this resource. They will learn in detail about the online part of the service called BARD (Braille and Audio Reading Download), which offers downloadable books and magazines in audio and Braille for patrons who cannot read standard print.

Demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) programs for e-books have seen significant changes within the last year, to cost and availability of short-term loans (STLs) as well as embargoed content from important academic publishers. The presenters, who manage a large DDA program at a small academic library, will evaluate the fiscal sustainability of DDA and the viability of using an aggregator-based DDA collection as a collection management tool. They will discuss DDA as a collection-management tool, illustrating with use, cost, and collection data. They will include a brief history of DDA at a small liberal arts university, focusing on the rationale for adopting the DDA model and the impact of increasing costs and reduced availability of academic publishers.

Ebrary’s Academic Complete collection, a subscription package totaling more than 100,000 titles, is both loved and loathed by the library community. While statistics have consistently shown high use and low cost per use, these have been offset by user complaints about the interface and the instability of package content.

Linden and Tudesco analyzed 13 years of usage data to identify patterns and explore the role of this resource in a sustainable collection.

Amigos now has an e-book platform, developed by our members and available to all libraries: the Amigos eShelf℠ Service. Our focus was to create a platform that allows libraries to have more options when it comes to working with e-books. Our first version is out and ready for use.

In this presentation, Chris will demonstrate the service's current functionality, discuss the development process, explain the pricing model, look at future functionality, and take any questions or concerns you have. Stop by to see what we've been doing for the past two years!

Anecdotal evidence suggests that many academic librarians are unhappy with the native interfaces and features of some of the e-book packages they purchase. Digital Rights Management (DRM) in particular is a feature that is seen as undesirable and indeed can hinder the purchase of otherwise acceptable e-books. Librarians are not helpless, however, in determining the features offered by vendors; they can instead work with vendors to help determine the directions in which they take their products.

A small but effective way is the vendor-sponsored/librarian-presented workshop. At the invitation of JSTOR, a librarian from the Marx Library at the University of South Alabama worked with a member of JSTOR’s staff on a series of presentations for librarians in three southern states. While these presentations were designed to be informative, they also seemed to have the unintended effect of nudging JSTOR to make a few changes to their interface.

Oakland (CA) Public Library launched its pilot one-on-one e-book assistance service at the Main Library last spring, and we are in the process of expanding to three branches. Kirschner will discuss our evaluation of the service, as well as logistics, challenges, outreach, and our strategy to expand to all 16 branches.

Description of service: The library offers 30-minute scheduled appointments on a weekly basis during which a librarian spends one-on-one time assisting the patron with anything related to accessing their digital content, which includes Overdrive, Enki and OneClick eBooks, e-Audio and streaming movies, Zinio periodicals, and Freegal music. The library asks that patrons bring any devices they are using and help with a variety of e-book related questions, including step-by-step account set-up and management, app downloads, holds and checkouts, device troubleshooting, e-book platform guidance.

Learn about e-book developments in Minnesota, including work with the New York Public Library on their Library Simplified project and SimplyE application, as well as Ebooks Minnesota. This presentation will conclude with a demo of the SimplyE App!

E-books offer an excellent way for libraries to provide resources to students at a distance or to quickly build or enhance a collection. They also allow libraries to continue to grow book collections within the constraints of a physical footprint.

In the spring of 2013, Delaware County Community College completed a renovation of the library into a learning commons. The existing book collection was reduced by almost half to fit within the physical constraints of the new facility. To ensure students continued to have access to relevant books for research, Library Services invested in e-books. In addition to both general and subject-specific subscription collections, a patron-driven acquisition model was adopted. To determine the effectiveness of this new collection strategy to meet student, faculty, and staff needs, Library Services surveyed students to determine their preferences for using e-books. This presentation offers a case study of student preferences for e-books as highlighted by the survey data and usage statistics, with specific attention paid to the patron-driven acquisitions model.

This session will provide formula analysis to assist librarians in choosing the e-book DDA business model that works best for libraries. These models include short-term loan only, short-term loan with purchases after the trigger threshold is met, and straight purchase with no short-term loans. Early Kent State University Libraries (KSUL) analysis has shown that neither STL option produced cost savings for KSUL.

Today with four full years of KSUL DDA purchase data, they have been able to develop parallel scenarios for each business model in order to further determine which model provides the best value for Kent State University. Determining collections value will vary from one library to another depending upon library objectives. For example, the ownership vs. lease concept plays an important role in collection strategy and expenditures. Even so, formula analysis is a valuable tool for the librarian to determine which DDA model best suits their library from cost-effective perspective given the actual e-book usage in a library collection. This session will demonstrate how applying this formula to data obtained from other universities will provide comparative analysis and identify criteria effecting value added outcomes.

How can libraries get the most from their investment in e-books? One area is examine is your relationship with publishers and how your partners can help you with your goals.

This session will cover new research in three key e-resources trends:

• Your Content is Time-Sensitive
• Know Your Users
• Competing in the Age of Free and Open Education

Strategies for successful use of e-resources in collaboration with your publishing partners will be shared along with the research. Links to research materials and learning community information will be shared at the close of the session.

In his presentation, Pun will share how he supported e-book services in NYU-Shanghai. In the spring of 2015, most textbooks were available as e-format. Students faced challenges in accessing their e-textbooks available in different databases and accounts (e.g. Amazon, ebrary, etc). The other challenge was that teaching faculty preferred hard-copy texts, and students preferred to take notes on their devices. From train-the-trainer workshops to creating LibGuides to developing an e-book support service to organizing app services, Pun will offer advice and perspective in supporting e-books from various formats. Attendees will learn best practices in creating an e-book service program as well.

Space is a major issue for libraries. At Texas A&M University - Central Texas, one of the newest universities in the US, they have used e-books to rapidly expand their collections, while remaining within the limitations of their relatively small facility. Their hope is to use e-books to ensure that the physical library can transition as print collections move to fully electronic formats. They envision that eventually the entire physical space will be a digital commons. McCafferty will discuss various tactics used to do this, including the current move into demand-driven acquisitions, and the positive and negative results they have experienced.

Objective: For the past two years, the University of Arizona Libraries (UAL) have systematically evaluated required course materials submitted by faculty for potential purchase in e-format. The objective was not only to save students money, but also to quantitatively demonstrate to the campus the impact UAL was having by undertaking this project – potential cost savings and number of courses and students impacted.

Methods: Martin and Wallace will detail the processes through which the UA Libraries partnered with the campus bookstore to review, acquire, and promote these e-resources, automatically link the materials to the course management systems for each impacted course, and calculate the overall potential financial benefit this project has had for students. They will also describe the iterative process through which the project has evolved to become more automated and efficient, and the various challenges encountered along the way. Future plans for a qualitative assessment of the project through faculty interviews and student focus groups will also be detailed.

In 2013, Recovering the Classics asked designers from around the world to reimagine covers for great books in the public domain. This spring, the project announced a partnership with the New York Public Library, the White House and the Digital Public Library of America to bring the covers to libraries and schools nationwide through special edition e-books. Now the project is looking for libraries, schools, book stores, galleries, local civic organizations, and others across the country to create their own events around the covers - exhibits, readings, school activities, or design-a-thons. Come learn how different libraries and schools are using the covers to engage their local communities.

Coming together for this series of events will develop a community of readers who will share ideas, events and curricula around these classics for years to come.