Chemistry Titles - Pilot Project 1

1. 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. • 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. http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/blog/bizbrary/?page_id=45 • In-class presentations • Email & e-newsletters • 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 3-4patron-initiated short-term loans (small fraction of purchase price) • Short-term loans (STLs) = download or >5 minutes of reading • $25,000 committed to pilot project (spentby 3/20/2011). All non-purchased titles were then pulled from our catalog. • FINDINGS • 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 Patron driven acquisition works. Don’t be afraid of it. A variety of models including selector-guided programs are successful. Publicity is not required. E-books can be & are discovered by patrons in your catalog. Biggest benefit of large-scale PDA catalog loads may be in meeting patron needs via short-term loans. Most used Sci/Tech Title in 2011: Statistical Detection & Surveillance of Geographic Clusters Most used Business Title in 2011: Introduction to Marketing Concepts • First 7 Titles Purchased • 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 • Thermodynamics and Introductory Statistical Mechanics • Mathematics for Physical Chemistry : A Guide to Calculation in Physical and General Chemistry 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 abwagner@buffalo.edu