Transcript Patron Driven E-Book Acquisitions: Crowd sourcing gone wild? A. Ben Wagner, Chemistry & Physics Librarian, University at Buffalo Chemistry Titles - Pilot.

Patron Driven E-Book Acquisitions: Crowd sourcing gone wild?
A. Ben Wagner, Chemistry & Physics Librarian, University at Buffalo
Chemistry Titles - Pilot Project 1
In September 2008, I selected 59 recent chemistry
books appropriate for our collection. Total price was
$10,180. Records were inserted into our catalog.
Absolutely no publicity was done. I wanted to test
if and when patrons would discover them in the
course of normal searching.
Items were purchased automatically upon second
use, no librarian intervention.
Results
 25 titles (42%) were purchased automatically to
date at a cost of $3,890.
 11 titles were purchased within the 1st month.
 7 more titles were purchased within the next
three months.
 Latest purchase was July 22, 2010.
13 titles (22%) were purchased by me in April
2009 with year-end money costing $2,280. I deemed
these titles worthy of addition to our permanent
collection.
21 (35%) titles remain in the catalog awaiting
discovery & purchase.
First 7 Titles Purchased
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Greene's Protective Groups in Organic Synthesis
Catalyst Preparation : Science and Engineering
Metal Oxides : Chemistry and Applications
Molecular Modelling for Beginners
Name Reactions of Functional Group
Transformations
6) Thermodynamics and Introductory Statistical
Mechanics
7) Mathematics for Physical Chemistry : A Guide to
Calculation in Physical and General Chemistry
Liaison Selected Clusters –
Pilot Project 2 (Charles Lyons)
In 2009, our business librarian created & purchased
two topical clusters of eBooks:
Careers & Entrepreneurship.
Why these topics:
 High demand, high interest, broad appeal
 Bang for the buck – general interest titles
cheaper, hence able to buy many titles.
 EBooks give distance students more convenient
access, e.g.:
 UB Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership
located downtown
Clusters allowed targeted promotion to specific
groups of users.
 Blog entries on business guides.
ALL IN – 55,000 PDA Titles
(UB E-Books Task Force)
In January 2011, as a large-scale trial, 55,000 titles
from EBook Library (EBL) were loaded into our
catalog, essentially all EBL titles meeting the
following criteria:
 Published 2007+ & under $175
 A few non-academic publishers excluded
How it worked:
 Almost no publicity. What would patrons discover
on their own? (helped by large # of titles & recent
dates coming to top of results)
Titles not purchased until 3-4 patron-initiated shortterm loans (small fraction of purchase price)
 Short-term loans (STLs) = download or >5
minutes of reading
http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/blog/bizbrary/?page_id=45
$25,000 committed to pilot project (spent by
3/20/2011). All non-purchased titles were then pulled
from our catalog.
 In-class presentations
 Email & e-newsletters
FINDINGS
Most used Sci/Tech Title
in 2011:
Most used Business
Title in 2011:
Statistical Detection &
Surveillance of Geographic
Clusters
Introduction to Marketing
Concepts
 1,878 STLs ($17,950 = 74% of funds)
 81 autopurchases ($6,400 = 26% of funds)
 978 unique users
 1 user initiated 154 STLs, next highest=28
▲ A Wordle diagram of
most recent 200 article titles about
e-books from Library Literature & Information Science database.
Conclusions
1. Patron driven acquisition works.
Don’t be afraid of it.
2. A variety of models including
selector-guided programs are
successful.
3. Publicity is not required. E-books
can be & are discovered by patrons
in your catalog.
4. Biggest benefit of large-scale PDA
catalog loads may be in meeting
patron needs via short-term loans.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Charles Lyons, our Scholarly
Communication and Electronic Resources Librarian,
and the UB E-Book Task Force for providing
assistance & data for this project. Task Force
Members: Charlie D’Aniello, Cynthia Bertuca, Nina
Cascio, Kate Cunningham-Hendrix, John Ilardo,
Charles Lyons, Sue Neumeister.
For further information:
Please contact [email protected]