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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 1 st 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.

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

(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
short-term 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
Most used Sci/Tech Title
in 2011:

First 7 Titles Purchased

ALL IN 55,000 PDA Titles

Statistical Detection &


Surveillance of Geographic
Clusters

FINDINGS
Most used Business
Title in 2011:
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.
Dont 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 DAniello, Cynthia Bertuca, Nina
Cascio, Kate Cunningham-Hendrix, John Ilardo,
Charles Lyons, Sue Neumeister.

For further information:


Please contact abwagner@buffalo.edu

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