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.

AcknowledgmentsMany 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.

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

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.

A. Ben Wagner, Chemistry & Physics Librarian, University at Buffalo

For further information:Please contact abwagner@buffalo.edu

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 short-term loans (small fraction of purchase price)

Short-term loans (STLs) = download or >5 minutes of reading

$25,000 committed to pilot project (spent by 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

Patron Driven E-Book Acquisitions: Crowd sourcing gone wild?

▲ A Wordle diagram of most recent 200 article titles about e-books from Library Literature & Information Science database.

First 7 Titles Purchased

1) Greene's Protective Groups in Organic Synthesis 2) Catalyst Preparation : Science and Engineering3) Metal Oxides : Chemistry and Applications4) Molecular Modelling for Beginners 5) 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

Most used Business Title in 2011: Introduction to Marketing Concepts

Most used Sci/Tech Title in 2011: Statistical Detection & Surveillance of Geographic Clusters