Jim Dooley

Interrogating Demand: Pathways Toward Purchase in Patron‐Influenced E‐Book Models

E‐books are available to academic libraries through a wide variety of acquisition models. The University of California, Merced (UC Merced) Library has used demand‐driven acquisitions (DDA) as its principal model for providing access to e‐books from its founding in 2005 to the present. This paper will discuss the influence of the situation at UC Merced on the implementation of DDA plans for e‐books and the results of the most recent five years of operations of these plans. E‐Books at UC Merced The University of California, Merced (UC Merced), the tenth campus in the University of California system and the first new American research university in the 21st century, welcomed its first class in 2005. The initial class comprised 875 students, mostly undergraduates. In fall 2015, UC Merced had 6,700 students including almost 400 graduate students. There is a proposal currently under review to construct sufficient academic buildings and student housing to allow the campus to grow to 10,000 students including 1,000 graduate students by 2020. From the beginning, e‐books have been a very important component of collection development at UC Merced. At the present time the library has approximately 1.2 million e‐books available and a print collection of approximately 125,000 volumes. Of the 1.2 million available e‐books, 800,000 volumes are available through University of California system‐wide package licenses with publishers such as Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier. In a majority of cases negotiations for system‐wide e‐book packages are linked to negotiations for journal packages from the same publishers. This trend has accelerated during the past five years. The remaining 400,000 e‐books are available through a variety of locally licensed models: 128,000 through an ebrary Academic Complete subscription; 216,000 through an EBL demand‐ driven acquisitions (DDA) plan with purchase on the fourth use after three short‐term loans (STLs); and 55,000 through a DDA plan with MyiLibrary with purchase on the second use without STLs. The Academic Complete subscription provides access to a wide variety of academic titles with unlimited simultaneous users for a very low per title cost. A potential disadvantage is that if the subscription were to be allowed to lapse, all access would be lost. Since UC Merced anticipates being able to maintain the subscription for the foreseeable future, this is not an issue. One of the main reasons for choosing EBL as the library’s principal e‐book aggregator, was EBL’s use of “non‐linear lending.” This model is not quite unlimited simultaneous users, but it’s close. The model allows a specified number of accesses during a calendar year, usually 300 or 325, before an additional copy needs to be purchased to maintain access to that title. The number of accesses resets each calendar year. This model is extremely useful when faculty assign e‐books for class reading. If these books were available with 1‐ user or even 3‐user licenses, the number of turnaways and the resulting frustration could be significant. At UC Merced only one title available under “non‐linear lending” has exceeded the number of allowed uses over ten years. The MyiLibrary DDA plan was originally implemented to provide access to titles not available from EBL. It was also an experiment with a different DDA model that didn’t involve the use of STLs. Since the fall of 2014 the MyiLibrary plan has also been used to provide access to titles that Copyright of this contribution remains in the name of the author(s). http://dx.doi.org/10.5703/1288284316306 Patron‐Driven Acquisitions and Interlibrary Loan 488 certain publishers were no longer making available through DDA plans with STLs. Content from publishers that no longer support DDA plans of any type is no longer available at UC Merced except for a small number of titles individually purchased. According to ProQuest the EBL and ebrary catalogues should be combined by the end of 2015. The EBL catalogue has already been deduped against ebrary Academic Complete at UC Merced. The library is currently in the process of examining the new publishers currently with ebrary that will be available when the two catalogues are merged. At this point a number of non‐academic publishers have been excluded from the plan. Other publishers may be excluded in the future based on willingness to support short‐term loans, the cost of STLs, and the availability of titles under non‐linear lending licenses. Now that ProQuest has also acquired MyiLibrary, the expectation is that there will be one unified catalogue of all ProQuest e‐books in the not too distant future. Having almost 275,000 e‐books available through DDA is contrary to the collection development practices of most research libraries that carefully circumscribe the size of their DDA pools by subject, publisher, publication year, etc. in order to guard against possible runaway costs. Other than blocking most titles in Library of Congress class R (medicine, nursing, dentistry, etc.), removing certain non‐academic publishers and having a

Changing Library Operations

300 per title price limit, there have been no other substantial restrictions on the size of the DDA pool at UC Merced. There is specifically no limit by publication year. The library chose to take this approach primarily due to the rapid, uncoordinated increase in faculty hiring and in the establishment of new programs resulting from the university being in a start‐up mode for the first decade of its existence. Both the administration and faculty have tried to expand academic offerings as quickly as possible. Often this has resulted in hiring an individual faculty member in a field that is completely new at UC Merced. In many cases the library did not know that the faculty member had been hired until he or she appeared at the library to request book purchases and journal subscriptions. Since many new faculty, particularly in the humanities, have research agendas that are not shared by other UC Merced faculty, they often request information resources that are not useful to other faculty or programs. These conditions made it practically impossible to manage the DDA plans in the traditional manner. Another reason for taking this approach is that the library did not have and still does not have a sufficient number of librarians to have assigned subject selectors. There simply aren’t enough people to do title‐by‐title selection either for print or electronic monographs. Because of the emphasis on interdisciplinary work, UC Merced does not have traditional academic departments. Faculty have self‐ organized into various groups based on disciplinary or cross‐disciplinary working relationships. These organizational factors have also made it difficult for the library to initiate and maintain discussions with faculty regarding collection development. Under these circumstances, the best way to support teaching and research has been to cast a wide net with the DDA plans. As academic hiring becomes more stable, it is anticipated that the DDA pool will become more focused. The experience of UC Merced with the EBL DDA plan for the five‐year period from July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2015 is shown in the following statistics: Total spend:

Changing Library Operations: Information Literacy and E-resources: The Credo Student Survey

337, 785

From Print to Electronic: The UC Merced Experience

The following article was presented in a panel discussion which explored library operational adaptations to the changing technologies of information distribution and usage. The librarians on the panel presented glimpses of the changes occurring in their library operations as they transition to services without print. The librarians explored, through the evidence of their changing library operations, a range of topics, for example: trends in e‐resource acquisition and usage; changes in consortia; processing and organizational changes; and developments in open access publishing and library e‐publication. After initial presentations, the panel and moderator encouraged questions, comments, and discussion with attendees. Jim Dooley, Head, Collection Services, University of California, Merced The University of California, Merced (UC Merced) opened in 2005 as the tenth University of California (UC) campus and welcomed its tenth freshman class in August 2014. From 875 students and thirteen faculty in 2005, UC Merced has grown to 6,300 students, including 350 graduate students. Currently there are 207 tenured or tenure‐track faculty and an additional 140 lecturers. When the campus opened in 2005 only the library building was operational. Currently there are six academic buildings, a seventh under construction and residence halls housing over 2,000 students. The campus hopes to receive a Carnegie Classification as a Research University‐ High Output in 2015. The current strategic plan envisions that the campus will grow to 10,000 students, including 1,000 graduate students, by 2010. Space for the expansion will be obtained through a public‐private partnership with a commercial developer that will construct a series of mixed‐use buildings on a site adjacent to the current campus. For the UC Merced Library the collection philosophy remains access vs. ownership or just‐ in‐time vs. just‐in‐case. The goal is to meet an information need in the most appropriate way regardless of format or means of acquisition. It doesn’t matter if the information resource is purchased, rented, or borrowed; only that the need is met. One manifestation of this philosophy is the heave reliance on demand‐driven acquisitions (DDA) and subscription databases to provide access to locally licensed e‐books. Collection funds provide access to the largest possible number of titles, not to purchase a much smaller number of titles in order to build a permanent collection. Currently the library collection is approximately 92% electronic. This includes journals, e‐books, databases, and U.S. government documents. The library subscribes to the Marcive Documents Without Shelves service which provides bibliographic records with links to electronic U.S. government documents to enable it to be a Federal Depository Library. The high percentage of electronic resources in the collection is not a result of favoring access over ownership. Rather, the high percentage results from the library being opened in 2005 when the transition from print to electronic was well underway. The collection is a combination of electronic resources licensed by the California Digital Library (CDL) for all or a subset of UC campuses, as well as locally licensed electronic resources and purchased print books and DVDs. Despite its name, the CDL is a part of the University of California Office of the President and provides negotiation and licensing services as well as technology development and management to the UC libraries. Although negotiation and Copyright of this contribution remains in the name of the author(s). http://dx.doi.org/10.5703/1288284315576 Collection Development 253 licensing services for electronic resources are provided by the CDL, these resources are not “free” to the campus libraries. Each UC library pays a proportional share for access to these resources. Currently 60% of the UC Merced Library collection budget goes to provide access to CDL‐licensed resources. At the UC Merced Library the transition from print to electronic is almost complete for serials. Currently the library provides access to approximately 112,000 online journals (most through CDL‐licensed packages) and 20 print journals. The print serials are all in the humanities and currently unavailable online. The print subscription would be cancelled if any were to become available electronically. Acquisition of print books has been through approval plans supplemented by firm orders at faculty request. The print collection has also been supplemented by various gifts of books. Except for gifts, all books in the collection were published in 2003 or later. From the opening of the library there have been two approval plans: one for humanities, social sciences, and arts, and one for science. At the beginning both approval plans were rather broad because academic planning was unfocused. As programs developed, the scope of the approval plans has been progressively narrowed to focus on areas of campus research and teaching. Early in 2014 the science approval plan was shut down completely due to a combination of decreasing circulation and budget pressures. The social sciences, humanities, and arts approval plan remains. Currently there are just over 118,000 print books and 2,600 DVDs in the collection. When the library opened in 2005, probably few would have predicted that e‐books would become such an important part of research library collections in a decade. Very few e‐books were available through UC systemwide licenses. While there never was an intention to replace print books with e‐books, the library began experiments with e‐books soon after opening. The first was a subscription to ebrary Academic Complete which provided access to a growing collection of academic titles, now over 116,000, at a very low cost per title as long as the subscription was maintained. The largest number of locally licensed e‐books are available through demand‐ driven acquisitions (DDA) plans with EBL (300,000 titles) and MyiLibrary (50,000 titles). Under the EBL plan, titles are purchased on the fourth access after three short ‐term loans (STLs). The MyiLibrary plan does not employ STLs; titles are purchased on the second access. During the past ten years large numbers of e‐books have become available at UC Merced through UC systemwide agreements including both stand‐alone packages (Royal Society of Chemistry, ASME) and e‐books linked to journal packages (Springer, Wiley, Elsevier). The result is that the library now provides electronic access to 1.05 million titles: 580,000 through systemwide packages and 470,000 through local licenses. This is currently nine times the number of print titles in the local collection. Because approximately 30% of available e‐books are accessed through a DDA plan with STLs, the library has been significantly affected by the increases in STL rates announced by certain publishers in the summer of 2014. The timing of these increases so close to the start of the fiscal year was decried by many libraries and library consortia. The Boston Library Consortium wrote an open letter published in The Chronicle of Higher Education strongly objecting both to the timing and size of these increases. (http://chronicle.com/blogs/letters/ebook ‐pricing‐hikes‐amount‐to‐price‐gouging) While the timing of these increases is certainly an issue, the effects on the UC Merced collection are also significant. The monthly spend for the EBL DDA plan has remained relatively constant for the past several years in spite of significant yearly enrollment increases. After the STL increases, spending increased 50%, even though enrollment for 2014‐2015 had been held at last year’s levels. The number of STLs increased slightly for these months compared to the corresponding months in the previous year, but the costs increased out of all proportion to the increased usage. A hypothetical example illustrates the problem. A STL at 10% for a book with a

Demand Driven Acquisitions at UC Merced

200 list price is

Changing Library Operations--Orbis Cascade Alliance: Collection Development

20; a STL at 25% for the same book is

Changing Library Operations-Data Curation

50. As a result of these increases, the content of over a dozen publishers has been completely removed