an ethos of access: how a small academic library transformed its collection-building processes

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An Ethos of Access: How a SmallAcademic Library Transformed ItsCollection-Building ProcessesKady Ferrisa & Tina Herman Bucka

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Collection Management, 39:127–144, 2014Published with license by Taylor & FrancisISSN: 0146-2679 print / 1545-2549 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01462679.2014.900732

An Ethos of Access: How a Small AcademicLibrary Transformed Its Collection-Building

Processes

KADY FERRIS and TINA HERMAN BUCKSt. Edward’s University, Austin, Texas

This article details the way that a small academic library trans-formed its collection-building processes and took a fresh look atthe objectives of cataloging along the way. The St. Edward’s Uni-versity Library accomplished this by embracing a convergence ofnew technologies and tools: demand-driven acquisitions, a pow-erful discovery layer, the robust e-book marketplace for academiclibraries, and Amazon’s vast stock and two-day shipping.

KEYWORDS demand-driven acquisitions, e-books, batch loading,collection development, cataloging

INTRODUCTION

Over the past three years, collection management has changed completelyat St. Edward’s University Library. In 2010, the library used a title-by-titleoperation driven by our nine librarians. The order-to-shelf time for a bookaveraged three to four weeks. Today, collection-building is mostly automatedvia a demand-driven e-book acquisitions program that makes about 1,000new titles available to our community each week. Our 5,000 full-time equiv-alent patrons drive most purchases both via the demand-driven acquisitions(DDA) program and via requests for purchases and interlibrary loans.

The library was moving toward a more demand-driven collection devel-opment policy in the summer of 2011 when we received the announcementthat the library building would close and be rebuilt. During the reconstruc-tion, the print collection had to be put into dark storage; the communitywould spend a year without a print collection. The authors wanted to

© Kady Ferris and Tina Herman BuckAddress correspondence to Tina Herman Buck, St. Edward’s University, Munday Library,

3001 S. Congress Avenue, Austin, TX 78704. E-mail: [email protected]

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128 K. Ferris and T. H. Buck

ameliorate the effects of that as much as possible. These events pushedus to convert to an almost wholly demand-driven collection. St. Edward’sLibrary accomplished this by embracing a host of new technologies andtools: DDA, a powerful discovery layer, the robust e-book marketplace foracademic libraries, and Amazon’s vast stock and two-day shipping.

This new model reflects the archival mantra of “more product, less pro-cess” (Greene and Meissner 2005, 1). The article of the same name calls uponarchivists to do the processing necessary to give access to users quickly ratherthan insist upon fastidious work on a few items, leaving vast, inaccessiblebacklogs. In other words, they must acknowledge that professional time islimited and probably always will be. The call should be taken to heart bylibrarians focused on hand-selecting every title in their collection and cat-aloging each to the highest standards. St. Edward’s needed a larger, morecurrent collection of monographs and needed to deliver them to the com-munity quickly. But our staffing levels do not permit the quantity of librariantime that one-by-one selection and cataloging require, and additional staffingis unlikely. The current value and viability of traditional practices had to beexamined.

BACKGROUND: THE PRE-DDA MODEL

St. Edward’s University is a Catholic liberal arts university in Austin, Texas,with a student population of about 4,300 divided between 3,750 undergradu-ates and 550 master’s-level graduate students (St. Edward’s University Officeof Institutional Research 2013). St. Edward’s is a teaching institution whereoriginal research, while encouraged, is not the primary focus of faculty. Be-cause of this emphasis on teaching rather than research, the purpose of thelibrary collection is to support the currently taught curriculum. The collec-tion, therefore, is not intended to be comprehensive in any area, unlike thecollections at research institutions.

The library employs nine full-time librarians and seven staff members.Since 2005, the integrated library system (ILS) has been Innovative Inter-face’s Millennium and since 2010 the discovery layer has been the EBSCODiscovery Service (EDS). The Technical Services department, which man-ages acquisitions, licensing, access, and cataloging for all resources, includesa continuing resources librarian, a collection development librarian, an acqui-sitions and metadata librarian, and one shared staff person. The collectiondevelopment and acquisitions and metadata librarians manage the mono-graphic collection, both print and electronic.

Each librarian has collection development responsibilities for at least onesubject area in addition to other responsibilities like reference, instruction,archives, and technical services. None of the librarians are subject expertsin their assigned disciplines. Prior to 2011, purchasing decisions were based

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An Ethos of Access 129

on some knowledge of the curriculum and faculty requests, but few facultymembers had time to engage with the process. Because St. Edward’s is ateaching institution, full-time tenure-track teaching faculty usually teach fourclasses a semester and participate on campus committees. It leaves little timefor the library’s collection.

Librarians, too, pushed collection development to the back burner be-cause collecting was never as pressing as prepping for a class or helping astudent right then and there. Also, three subject liaison librarians are on nine-or ten-month contracts, and their contracts dictate that they be gone for thesummer. This represented an annual lost opportunity to build the collectionwhen there were fewer students on campus and collection work could bedone. For those librarians on campus during the summer, there were stillclasses to teach but fewer librarians to teach them.

Consequently, new content was not getting added to the collection ata consistent rate. The collection would stagnate over the course of the fallsemester until instruction responsibilities tapered. More often than not, thelibrarians bought books based on reviews in Library Journal and ChoiceReviews. With the tapering of instruction, librarians had time to sit down andreview the stacks of Choice cards that had been accumulating over months.Content was ordered in November or December and an influx of new printmaterials was received in February. The librarians would still add content atpatron request, but those requests were few and far between. Title-by-titleselection is time-consuming and was not working for St. Edward’s as theprimary collection-building tool.

Many libraries turn to approval plans when title-by-title selection be-comes overwhelming. St. Edward’s rejected approval plans that involvedprint books being automatically shipped to the library. The staff time involvedin oversight, tracking, reviewing, and possible return shipping was not fea-sible, especially before the first collection development librarian started in2010. However, the authors have been trialing an e-mail–based approvalplan with the religion and philosophy faculty; e-mail notifications of newtitles are sent in place of physical books. A small minority of faculty hasparticipated thus far, selecting about 50 titles, and only half of these havecirculated. Thus, faculty involvement made these titles no more likely to cir-culate than any others, but the faculty like to see all the titles coming out intheir field so the authors continue to provide this service.

Much like the faculty-selected titles from the approval plan, the restof the library’s collection comprised well-reviewed monographs, ostensiblybased on the curriculum, half of which never circulated. The library wasnever in the business of collecting comprehensively so the librarians werenot concerned about missing out on collecting “significant” works. The mainconcern was ensuring that collection money was spent on books that wereactually going to be of use to patrons. The authors wanted use to driveacquisitions rather than to acquire materials and hope they will be used.

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RATIONALE FOR MOVING TO A DDA MODEL

Having a little-used monograph collection is not atypical for an academiclibrary (Kent 1979; Jobe and Levine-Clark 2008; Levine-Clark 2011), but inlate 2010 the library faced a budget that had barely increased in six years,just nine percent from fiscal year 2006–2007 to fiscal year 2011–2012, about1.5% a year. Serial and database costs, of course, had risen every year atthe average rate of seven percent and had slowly eroded the monographsbudget to almost nothing. The monograph budget in fiscal year 2006–2007was nearly $157,000; in fiscal year 2011–2012, just over $64,000. With solittle discretionary money to spend, it was necessary to ensure that collectiondollars were not being “wasted” on items that would not be useful to thepatron community.

St. Edward’s curriculum demands a steady infusion of monographs oncurrent topics. While the largest undergraduate majors are business, biology,and psychology, the most-used books support a core curriculum centeredon current, policy-based social issues. Every St. Edward’s undergraduate hasto take two research-heavy courses; both focus on policy currently beingdebated, and both require students to cite at least two books. Each semesterpresents a new set of issues that fit the criteria of these assignments, andthe librarians need to buy the latest books on those topics. This modelpresented a problem: It was impossible to order enough on a given topicand to anticipate which would be the hot topics for the semester. As is thelimitation of all print material, the one copy purchased would be useful tothe first student, but the remaining students were out of luck. The budgetdid not permit purchases of multiple copies. Even if it did, traditional libraryvendors could not generally ship fast enough to fill the need between thetime most students chose a “hot” topic and the time when they needed theapplicable resources.

Electronic copies of these books would seem to be a viable solution, butback in 2010 the library’s only e-book packages were either reference titlesor were limited to one user at a time. Through the TexShare consortium, thelibrary had been buying NetLibrary packages, which were single-user titles,but this option was no longer available once EBSCO bought NetLibrary in2010. By 2011, it was necessary to find a new e-book vendor that wasboth cost-effective and provided multi-user access to titles. At this point, theauthors learned about EBL.

Several St. Edward’s librarians had heard of DDA independentlythroughout 2010, notably in a session at the Texas Library Association’sAnnual Conference where Susan Macicak and Lindsay Schell spoke aboutthe successful implementation of an EBL DDA program at the University ofTexas at Austin (Ginanni, Macicak, and Schell 2010). That same year thelibrary hired its first dedicated collection development librarian. After writ-ing a collection development policy and assessing the print collection, she

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collaborated with the acquisitions and metadata librarian to plan a courseof action with e-books. In early 2011, the authors trialed EBL, which was aseasoned player in DDA, and ebrary, which had a strong subscription modeland was just getting into DDA. Ultimately, the authors decided in favor ofEBL due to their ability to automate DDA collection-building.1 EBL couldemail weekly MARC files of added and deleted titles, whereas ebrary wouldrequire manual selection of titles to add.

THE NEW DDA EXPERIENCE: WORKING WITH OUR VENDORS

EBL worked with St. Edward’s Library to construct a profile of relevant ma-terials to make available to our patrons. The goal was to be as inclusive aspossible without having irrelevant materials. Focusing on academic content,our profile included all the university presses available along with knownpublishers like Wiley. Our profile excluded many British and Australian pub-lishers with content too country-specific for St. Edward’s students. To furtherlimit the pool and reduce overlap with our existing NetLibrary collections,the publication date of materials was limited to the current year and theprevious year, making these titles the most up-to-date part of the library’scollection. The library’s policy to support the curriculum drove selection ofsubject criteria: Any area that was typically taught at the university was in-cluded in the profile. Subjects outside the curriculum were excluded. Forexample, because St. Edward’s does not teach engineering, engineering ti-tles were excluded. EBL also provided the granularity to exclude certainkeywords or Library of Congress classifications.

There was concern about spending the entire budget in the first coupleof months, not unlike the “banana books incident” of early PDA/DDA lore(Wiersma and Fong 2011). In the first two months of an early pilot withNetLibrary, the University of Colorado Boulder spent $50,000 primarily onbooks about or just featuring the word “banana” because of an assignmentin a large undergraduate geography class and low barriers for purchase (justtwo clicks into a title triggered a purchase). To avoid this kind of situation,EBL was informed about how much the library had to spend ($25,000),and EBL reduced the risk of overspending by limiting the number of titlesavailable. Additionally, a $200 price limit was placed on the titles users couldtrigger without librarian mediation. The authors have since raised this limitto $500 because the cost concern was unfounded and the limit hinderedpatrons’ access to materials that supported the curriculum.

EBL generated a list of titles that fit the criteria, and these titles comprisedSt. Edward’s initial DDA collection of about 25,000 records in July 2011. Thesize of the collection has increased steadily since then and exceeded 81,000in October 2013. As a point of reference, the library has about 80,000 printbooks and just shy of 300,000 e-books in total. The primary growth agent has

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been the weekly EBL file of new titles available within our profile. A muchsmaller number is added to the library’s EBL profile manually in response torequests and perceived collection gaps.

EBL’s profiling system has not wholly eliminated certain categories fromthe library’s profile, such as travel, cooking, fiction, and joke books, thoughthe profiling has improved over time. This problem can be partially at-tributed to a profiling system that is dependent on the metadata providedby the publishers with whom EBL works. EBL can be notified to excludetitles whose subject headings include the words “juvenile fiction,” but biblio-graphic records without subject headings cannot be detected and removed,even though the titles are in fact juvenile fiction. Furthermore, numerouspublishers have been blocked from our profile, due to the non-academicnature of their titles. This content is not added because it fits neither thelibrary’s collection development policy nor the patrons’ curricular needs.However, titles that have been used are generally not removed, regardlessof content. Library patrons have had the final say in this matter; they usevery little “leisure” content.

St. Edward’s eventually began a small program with ebrary as well, inorder to thoroughly test DDA programs and to offer our patrons as wide avariety of publishers as possible. Just as the library obtains print monographsfrom more than one source, options when it comes to e-book acquisitionsare desirable. However, ebrary’s DDA process requires title-by-title selection.MARC records can be batch-loaded after selection, but the boxes next to eachtitle must be clicked within ebrary’s admin portal before this can happen.As discussed, one-by-one selection isn’t viable for St. Edward’s. Thus, the li-brary’s pool of DDA titles with ebrary has always numbered well under 2,000.

The authors opted to work directly with both DDA vendors, rather thanthrough a third party such as YBP, the library’s primary monograph jobber.Involving a third party seemed to add complications without commensuratebenefits. To be nimble and able to make timely corrections was desirable,and working directly with both DDA providers was likely to enable thelibrary to be responsive; this has proven to be the case.

The EBL and ebrary staff interfaces allow librarians and staff to turn onaccess for patrons very quickly. Librarians can make a title available in eitherplatform and give the user instant access via URL. The associated MARCrecords are loaded into Millennium at least weekly. Needless to say, patronsare delighted to gain access to desired titles, sometimes within minutes ofmaking a request. It is also easy to quickly enhance the collection if apressing gap is discovered, as when the Sandy Hook Elementary Schoolshooting suddenly made gun control and gun rights the hottest topic forstudents researching controversial social issues.

In late 2011, the authors added a field to the library’s ILLiad requestform that requires users requesting a book to select whether an e-book isacceptable to them. If they select yes, the ILL library assistant checks the

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catalogs of both EBL and ebrary and makes the titles available on one ofthose platforms. So far, sixty-one titles have been added to the library’s EBLand ebrary platforms this way. The patron has access to content on the sameday whereas they normally would have had to wait a week or more for aphysical ILL item to arrive.

DDA METADATA: CATALOGING AND BATCH-LOADING

EBL’s MARC records are not pristine cataloging; title fields frequently lackstatements of responsibility, edition information may turn up in the subti-tle, and entire fields may be in all capital letters. Subject headings are aseemingly random mixture of Library of Congress Subject Headings, Medi-cal Subject Headings, Book Industry Standards and Communications subjectheadings and other terms, all generally coded as 650/4 (i.e., topical heading,source of heading unspecified). Sometimes contents notes contain wordsor chapter/part numberings that run together without appropriate spacing,thus posing problems for keyword searching. Most troubling is the high per-centage of records that lack subject fields, approximately one in nine (as ofAugust 7, 2013). EBL’s metadata appears to be drawn from publishers’ ONIXdata, thus varying in completeness and quality from one publisher to thenext (see Figures 1 and 2).

However, most EBL MARC records have one huge and overriding bene-fit: abundant table of contents, frequently stretching into multiple 505 fields.Along with summary notes (520 fields), they provide ample search terms forpatrons and offer a compelling level of specificity about the book’s contents.The table of contents may thus serve as both a finding tool and a meansfor the patron to confirm that the record represents a book with content onthe desired topic. A few subject headings and a title field do not seem todeliver as well in this regard. Amidst all the metadata in the library’s discov-ery layer, the generous EBL table of contents provides plenty of hooks tocapture a keyword search, even if the patron’s terms are overly specific. Outof just over 90,000 records, only 25 records have neither a 505 nor a 520 (asof August 7, 2013). Certainly, cleanly cataloged bibliographic records withabundant tables of contents are preferable. But given the choice, big TOCstrump traditionally perfect cataloging. This is good because correcting eachrecord is neither an option nor a priority.

From January 2013 through early August 2013, St. Edward’s averaged1,050 new records from EBL each week. Manual clean-up is not feasible forour Technical Services department of four. The acquisitions and metadatalibrarian manages monographic acquisitions and cataloging, as well as load-profiling for our Millennium ILS; the continuing resources librarian managesacquisitions and cataloging for journals and databases, as well as our EB-SCO Discovery layer. One shared full-time assistant handles copy cataloging,

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invoices, physical receipts and withdrawals, and a variety of database im-provement projects, among other tasks. (The collection development librar-ian is not involved with cataloging.) All of the technical services personnelhave faculty subject liaison responsibilities, as well. The library does nothave staff time for large and ongoing one-by-one cataloging projects.

FIGURE 1 Sample EBL MARC Record 1. (Continued)

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FIGURE 1 (Continued).

Extensive batch clean-up is also not feasible, due to the data itself. Mil-lennium has a powerful load-profiling functionality that can automatically acton the records as they are imported into our database, as well as a very func-tional batch-editing tool called Global Update. But these (as with most batchfunctions) require relatively consistent data in need of relatively consistentfixes, a condition not generally applicable to EBL’s variable metadata.

Instead, the focus is discoverability and “quick patron delivery” (Draper2013, 157). The weekly DDA batch files are loaded into the library’s Mil-lennium system the day we receive them; EDS is updated six days a week.Likewise, the acquisitions and metadata librarian promptly removes recordsfor any titles to which the vendor has lost access due to publisher licensingterms or because a publisher has pulled a file for clean-up.

In theory, the acquisitions and metadata librarian appreciates theprovider-neutral record (PNR) standard (Culbertson, Mandelstam, and Prager2009) and the goal of having all instances of an e-book on one record, butfinds in practice it is not a practical way to manage the steady stream of adds,deletes, and changes to the library’s DDA, subscription, and purchased e-book packages. PNR is designed for a one-by-one cataloging workflow, witha cataloger examining each record, but we live in a batch-load world (Wu andMitchell 2010). So St. Edward’s Library uses separate bibliographic recordsfor print and e-books and for the same e-book via multiple providers.

The reality facing the Technical Services department is that batch-loading has mostly supplanted cataloging, at least in the world of e-books. Inthe days when acquisitions were mostly title by title, we adhered to title-by-title cataloging standards that are impractical, if not impossible, for currentmeans of large-scale acquisitions. The current cataloging standards do notreflect this reality. As Mitchell, Thompson, and Wu (2010) said, “The cata-loging authorities are mute on the issue of best practices for batch record

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management, work that hinges on bibliographic records but is not really cata-loging in the traditional sense. Cataloging standards remain focused on fieldsand records rather than data management . . .” (516). In addition, Young’s(2011) survey of batch cataloging practices presents no solutions to the PNRproblem. Many catalogers are wrangling “big data” but our professional stan-

FIGURE 2 Sample EBL MARC Record 2. (Continued)

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FIGURE 2 (Continued).

dards have not kept pace. Whether batches of records follow AACR2 or RDAis not important to the library. Few, if any, of the differences would im-pact St. Edwards’ typical searcher. The traditionally important value of con-sistency between bibliographic records is not a significant concern either.It seems unlikely that patrons accustomed to searching in Google Books,Google Scholar, Amazon, Goodreads, WorldCat, and any number of otherbook-centric websites would be fazed by—or even notice—variants fromone library record to the next.

E-books purchased via DDA still receive a cataloging review not unlikethe older pre-DDA, title-by-title model. The acquisitions and metadata librar-ian does a quick “clean-up” on the bib record: adding Library of Congresssubject headings if none are present; correcting terminology, tags, and sub-fields on existing subjects; completing summary notes cut off mid-sentence(the exact same summary data is generally available via Amazon, publisher’ssites, and other online sources); and adding spaces as needed between wordsin tables of contents. The question one must ask: Is all this clean-up neces-sary? After all, the title has already been found and utilized at least four times,via short-term loans, despite its “messy” data. Is this clean-up what Greenetermed a “housekeeping compulsion” (Greene and Meissner 2005, 18), oris it an appropriate treatment of a bibliographic record that just became apermanent (or at least long-term) part of our collection? The authors do nothave an answer yet and are willing to invest the as-yet minimal amount oftime while continuing to consider the question. Presently, the value of sub-ject and geographic limiters in the discovery system, dependent on proper

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coding of subject (6XX) fields, is the most compelling argument to continueat least this portion of the clean-up.

Despite this occasional return to one-by-one cataloging, the new DDAbatch-loading model, by reducing the time drain of traditional cataloging, hashelped St. Edward’s very small library staff offer our community the mostcurrent and the largest monographic collection ever available.

DDA AND DISCOVERY

The most important consideration for batches of e-book bibliographicrecords is whether they can be found in the library’s discovery layer, whichis the patrons’ primary access point to the library collection. The Millenniumcatalog is not directly available from the library homepage. Instead, an EDSsearch box is placed prominently on the homepage and presented as theway to search for library content. EDS includes all catalog content (books,e-books, DVDs, streaming videos, journals) as well as articles from nearlyall journal databases and subscriptions. The library’s EDS defaults to includesynonyms and plurals of the search terms. Ever more powerful search capa-bilities make our content more accessible than earlier generations of OPACs.But these capabilities are dependent on having data to search.

A JSTOR package provides an example of that dependency on metadata.We purchased an e-book package from JSTOR that came with extremely briefcatalog records. The records contained no tables of contents or summarynotes, and 17% of the initial batch of 293 had no subject headings at all.Because ISBN batch searching in OCLC resulted in multiple hits for mosttitles, the acquisitions and metadata librarian evaluated the records, enhancedthem with summary notes (520s) from the vendor’s platform when needed(about one-third of the OCLC records), and overlaid the brief records oneby one. The acquisitions and metadata librarian spent about 20 staff hoursupgrading these records, including creating a new load table specific forthe task. As a one-time project, this is a tolerable use of time, but it is asituation that we will actively seek to avoid in the future, preferring vendorswho supply rich bibliographic records to load into the discovery layer. Ina complaint to JSTOR about the sparse cataloging, it was stated that briefrecords would inhibit patrons finding their e-books in EDS and that lowusage would lead us not to purchase their collections again. From April 2013to July 2013 the titles in our Books at JSTOR collections were accessed anaverage of 3.66 times per month. Following the record upgrade at the endof July, usage ticked up to an average of 5.66 times per month from August2013 to October 2013. In mid-November 2013 JSTOR informed St. Edward’sLibrary that they will be obtaining its e-book records from OCLC, so perhapsthe link between good data, usage, and sales resonated. As Esposito, Walker,and Ehling (2013) stated, “Practical book discovery . . . is largely a matter of

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search-engine marketing” (51). The discovery layer is the library’s searchengine, and good metadata is the “marketing” that patrons require in orderto locate the goods. The library marketplace would do well to take note andsupply abundant metadata.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRINT: INCREASED SPEED

E-books have certainly been the highest growth element of the library’scollection in the past two years, but the librarians still purchase print books.However, the way print is purchased has changed. What is most desired fromour vendors has shifted from processing or shelf-ready services to speedydelivery. Movement in this direction began prior to the construction project.Having to put the print collection into storage amplified the need to changein order to make the year without print as painless as possible.

A significant percentage of the library’s print purchases are now ma-terials that must be obtained quickly to fulfill a patron’s request; many arerequests from faculty for materials they need for the current semester. Stu-dent requests, also for the current semester, are a smaller segment. Theauthors found that our monograph vendor, YBP, did not fulfill these needsas quickly as desired, so the library has increasingly turned to Amazon. YBPhas a rush delivery service, but a very limited number of titles are eligiblefor it. Amazon’s shipping is significantly faster, and with the purchase of anAmazon Prime membership, two-day shipping is included with every orderfulfilled by Amazon (though not by most of their resellers). Add in Ama-zon’s vast stock, and they became a natural and growing part of the library’svendor base.

Amazon orders constituted less than 2% of the library’s firm orders infiscal year 2010–2011, but jumped to 23% in fiscal year 2012–2013. This is anincrease from 19 to 118 books, or more than 600%. In contrast, firm ordersthrough traditional library vendors decreased by about two-thirds betweenfiscal year 2010–2011 and fiscal year 2012–2013, falling from 1,045 to 277.

Reduced purchasing of physical items makes possible the increaseduse of Amazon. Technical services now has the staff time to copy cata-log and process the current flow of Amazon-purchased books and DVDs,whereas only a few years ago copious vendor processing was necessary tomanage physical purchases. At that time, nearly all print book purchaseswent through YBP so they could do the physical processing. The associatedWorldCat Cataloging Services provided the full catalog record, item record,and electronic invoice in one electronic bundle.

The library also uses Amazon for a purchase-on-demand program,which was trialed in 2012 and since implemented. The collection devel-opment librarian reviews interlibrary loan requests for books and reroutescurrent titles which seem well-suited to the curriculum to acquisitions for

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purchasing. The requesting patron is notified when the material is ready forcheck-out, typically in less than a week, likely a shorter turnaround timethan the average “container-based” interlibrary loan.

Ranganathan’s (1931) fourth law of library science is “save the time ofthe reader,” which is something that libraries have been working to improveupon with everything from indexes and union catalogs to OPACs and discov-ery tools. Libraries, however, are no longer the sole arbiters of information.Readers can now access information instantly and often do not need thelibrary to provide such access. When the reader finds a book to which thelibrary can provide access, the library’s obligation is to provide that accessas quickly as possible. Using traditional library jobbers for print orders canmean waiting not just weeks but maybe months for a title. Patrons can getalmost any book from Amazon in a matter of days. It doesn’t make senseto them that the library cannot. In addition, libraries run the risk of seemingobsolete or ineffective when they cannot deliver readily obtainable materialsquickly.

DDA CONSEQUENCES: COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT POLICY

Coming to the end of St. Edward’s “year without print,” the changes madehave become the de facto collection development policy. The focus hasbecome much less top-down, librarian-as-gatekeeper, and much more aboutgetting the patrons what they want, as quickly as they want, and in theform they want. This shift is certainly controversial for some librarians whobelieve that the integrity of academic library collections is being threatenedby DDA (Walters 2012), but the definition of a successful collection dependson the institution and its goals. St. Edward’s values an adaptable and dynamiccollection that supports an evolving curriculum. The librarians need to evolvewith it lest they collect themselves into irrelevance.

DDA is now the library’s main means of monograph acquisitions forboth e-book and print purchasing. The older “just-in-case” purchasing modelexisted because it was very difficult to get a book when it went out ofstock or out of print in the pre-Internet era. With the current print bookmarket, one can generally get a copy of even out of print titles very easilythrough Amazon, a secondary seller who uses Amazon, or AbeBooks. Withthe Internet at our disposal, librarians no longer have to fear missing out onsomething in its initial printing because it will most likely be available, if notthrough a library jobber, then through many of the tools available to regularbook customers. As Hazen (2010) points out, “libraries must therefore frametheir information goals in terms of providing access to content that they donot possess as well as on site holdings” (120).

In 2010, e-preferred was the library’s policy only for reference andjournal titles. Now the preference is to purchase electronic for most cur-

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ricular needs when possible, but to buy print if a patron specifically re-quests it or if an e-version is not available. Multi-user, simultaneous-accesse-books are preferred because they are more cost-effective and easier forpatrons to use than single-user titles. Additionally, faculty are more in-clined to explore and possibly adopt e-books if they are told: “Your stu-dents can all access this title at the same time, so you’re safe assigningreadings from it.” Downloadable e-books are also preferred. Download-ing is not a widely used feature but our users want to know that it ispossible. The librarians do have to coax patrons to try e-books in waysthat were never necessary with print. There is no explanation necessaryfor how to use a print book; you open it and read it. E-book platformsand their restrictions (downloads, simultaneous access, limited printing, abil-ity to annotate, etc.) often require much more explanation and reassur-ance. Additionally, each e-book platform looks and works differently, whichcan increase users’ reluctance to use e-books. However, this problem canusually be overcome when patrons see how much content is available tothem, regardless of whether the library building is open or whether an-other patron is currently using the same book. E-book benefits over print,such as being able to search through the full text, also work in theirfavor.

In terms of owned copies of books versus leased, the library has nostated preference. The goal is to provide access to materials our constituentsneed now rather than to build a collection for future unknown constituentneeds. In the rare cases that the library has experienced a loss of access toa leased e-book title, the title has been readily available via another vendoror in print.

The collection development librarian also wrote a deselection policyfor electronic books. The print weeding policy states that titles older than20 years that have not circulated in the past five years are candidates forweeding. For books in the DDA program, we want to limit financial ex-posure. Non-owned books that are at least three years old and have notseen use in the past two years will be removed. EBL has instituted a rollingwall to weed out these titles so that the weekly update files include thedeletes that fit the above criteria. The beauty of the EBL system is thateven something that is weeded can be added back immediately if a patronrequests it.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

The library’s current e-book collection comprises just over 256,000 titles.Thirty-four percent of those are non-owned DDA titles, 43% are subscriptiontitles, and the rest are owned. Close to 80% of the 256,000 titles were added inthe past three years. Perhaps as a direct result of the additions of this robust

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e-book collection, title-by-title selection by librarians has essentially ceasedboth in print and for e-books. When the EBL trial run initially started, theselectors were asked to hold off on purchase requests until the authors sawhow much money was expended on DDA titles. The library had a limitedbudget and wanted to avoid a situation where new DDA e-book offeringswould be prematurely removed halfway through the school year becausemoney ran out. Initial budget projections were on track and purchasingwas opened up again, but the number of purchase requests from librariansdropped significantly from years prior and has not seen an uptick since.As a result, the library no longer subscribes to the print Choice Reviewscards that few librarians were utilizing with any regularity even before thestart of the DDA program. Librarians still solicit requests from the facultyand purchase those titles with little to no mediation in whichever formatthey prefer, but the guesswork of monograph collections decisions has beenlimited significantly.

CONCLUSION AND GOING FORWARD

The circumstances that initially drove the library to demand-drivencollections—small budget, construction, a stored print collection, and verylimited staff—may be unusual, but the outcomes of the project can be ex-tended to many libraries. The newly renovated and expanded library openedon the first day of fall semester 2013. The librarians have been busy eversince with reference and instruction demands, as well as operationalizing anew space. Unlike in earlier years, however, the collection has not sufferedfor lack of attention because DDA delivers a regular influx of new materials.Cataloging demands have not impeded access because bibliographic recordbatches are loaded quickly.

The library has a large, responsive, current monograph collection thatsupports the curriculum, but the library only pays for what gets used; usedrives acquisitions and patrons’ needs are filled quickly. The library takesadvantage of the unprecedented searching power available via EDS andmakes metadata available to patrons quickly allowing discoverability to drivecataloging.

Going forward, it is expected that discovery and acquisitions tools willchange continuously. The library should be ready to take advantage ofopportunities, such as improvements in discovery systems, as well as tonavigate disruptions, such as the EBL-ebrary merger (ongoing as of Jan-uary 2014). The “more product, less process” mantra has served the li-brary’s collection development process well. St. Edward’s librarians intendto continue to disintermediate the content delivery process whenever pos-sible. In other words: Supply the goods to the patrons and get out oftheir way.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Todd Butler, Tiffany LeMaistre, and PongraczSennyey for their input.

NOTE

1. ProQuest acquired ebrary in early 2011 and subsequently acquired EBL in early 2013. Pro-Quest “plans to combine the strongest features of ebrary and EBL into a single, comprehensive e-book platform once finalized.” This merger appears to be in process as of this writing in January2014 (ProQuest 2013).

REFERENCES

Culbertson, Rebecca, Yael Mandelstam, and George Prager. 2009. ”Provider-neutral E-monograph MARC Record Guide, includes revisions to 2011.”Program for Cooperative Cataloging, Library of Congress. http://loc.gov/aba/pcc/bibco/documents/PN-Guide.pdf

Draper, Daniel C. 2013. “Managing Patron-Driven Acquisitions (PDA) Records in aMultiple Model Environment.” Technical Services Quarterly 30(2): 153–65.

Esposito, Joseph J., Kizer Walker, and Terry Ehling. 2013. “PDA and the UniversityPress.” Journal of Scholarly Publishing 44(3): s1–62.

Ginanni, Katy, Susan M. Macicak, and Lindsey Schell. 2010. “Pay-Per-View Modelsfor EJournals and E-Books.” Presentation at the 2010 Texas Library AssociationConference, San Antonio, TX, April 14–17, 2010.

Greene, Mark A., and Dennis Meissner. 2005. “More Product, Less Process: Revamp-ing Traditional Archival Processing,” American Archivist 68(2): 208–63.

Hazen, Dan. 2010. “Rethinking Research Library Collections.” Library Resources andTechnical Services 54(2): 115–21.

Jobe, Margaret M., and Michael Levine-Clark. 2008. “Use and Non-Use of Choice-Reviewed Titles in Undergraduate Libraries.” Journal of Academic Librarianship34(4), 295–394.

Kent, Allen. 1979. Use of Library Materials: The University of Pittsburgh study. NewYork: M. Dekker.

Levine-Clark, Michael. 2011. “Building a Demand-Driven Collection: The Univer-sity of Denver Experience.” In Patron Driven Acquisitions: History and BestPractices, edited by David A. Swords, 45–60. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Mitchell, Anne M., J. Michael Thompson, and Annie Wu. 2010. “Agile Cataloging:Staffing and Skills for a Bibliographic Future.” Cataloging & Classification Quar-terly 48(6/7): 506–24.

ProQuest. 2013. “ProQuest Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire EBL.” January 22.http://www.proquest.com/en-US/aboutus/pressroom/13/20130122.shtml

Ranganathan, S. R. 1931. The Five Laws of Library Science. Madras: The MadrasLibrary Association.

St. Edward’s University Office of Institutional Research. 2013. “Facts at a Glance. . . Fall 2013.” http://think.stedwards.edu/institutionalresearch/sites/think.

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stedwards.edu.institutionalresearch/files/Facts%20at%20a%20Glance%2C%20FA13.pdf

Walters, William H. 2012. “Patron Driven Acquisition and the Educational Mission ofthe Academic Library.” Library Resources and Technical Services 56(3): 199–213.

Wiersma, Gabrielle, and Yem Fong. 2011. “Patron-Driven E-book Solutions: MovingBeyond the Banana Books Incident.” Proceedings of the Charleston LibraryConference. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Wu, Annie, and Anne M. Mitchell. 2010. “Mass Management of E-Book CatalogRecords: Approaches, Challenges, and Solutions.” Library Resources & TechnicalServices 54(4): 164–74.

Young, Philip. 2011. “A Survey of Batch Cataloging Practices and Problems.” Tech-nical Services Quarterly 29(1): 22–41.

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an ethos of access: how a small academic library transformed its collection-building processes

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