Will vendor models change as libraries are forced to move away from traditional models? What about pay-per-view, POD, leasing? Libraries' budgets are being slashed. Scholarly sharing off the grid with social networking is gaining steam. Publishers and librarians have to understand which areas of social media will take precedence. Everyone is talking about patron-driven acquisition (PDA)...
The 30th Annual Charleston Conference, Anything Goes, in early November in South Carolina, certainly had plenty of topics to cover.
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During the first forum on Wednesday, Let them eat... Everything: Embracing a Patron-Driven Future, we were given clickers for real-time poll taking. Most interesting for me was the question, "Librarians, do you envision needing PPV, POD, leasing, and PDA? " The majority answer was, "Yes, but will take a lot of time to implement."
When publishers were asked the same question, the answer was, "No, too expensive to implement."
Ouch.
The speaker at this forum, Rick Anderson of the University of Utah, talked about how the current library model—which includes hard-copy Inter-library Lending (ILL); "big deals" with publishers; subscriptions; approval plans; reference/bibliography instruction; redundant cataloging; and print runs—is "less sane". ("Big deals" involve buying a lot to get some of what you need.) The current model does not make sense.
So what is more sane?
Single article purchases, Wikipedia, shared cataloging, ease of use, PDA for books, POD.... Rick's dream is that every book published is easily and immediately findable and that a library can purchase any book ever published immediately and offer it to their patrons as a book, an article, and/or a data set. Patrons should be exposed to all options and platforms and all books are shared through ILL. Rick believes that if journals do not begin offering article sales, they will fall victim to the same huge losses experienced by the music industry. ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................
During the preconference session, Preconference: E-Everything, Putting it all together, it was agreed that there are too many platforms to choose from, and that libraries are overwhelmed. Patrons want content seamlessly delivered. The goal is a unified, rationalized experience for the library patron.
Speakers included librarians such as Sue Polanka from Wright State University Libraries (who writes the No Shelf Required blog), and several of the big aggregators.
Spot polling gave us honest, real-time information: Who is better at aggregation: publishers or aggregators? "It's more cost-effective to go through vendors and vendors' quality is better; however, there are too many third parties; publishers and vendors are both trying to sell and librarians are overwhelmed with whom to choose."
Joseph Esposito (CEO, GiantChair) in his session, A Consortium for Sharing Primary Materials, proposed that academic institutions should create a consortium to digitize and share. He talked about the benefits...
- Eliminates free-rider problem
- Enormous leverage in membership (create one collection, number of members can increase; the model scales)
- Huge return on investment
...but also the problems:
- Intellectual rights?
- Do papers have proper scope for collection?
- Digitization project management
- Protecting original materials
- Hosting the service
- Duration of the collection
The iPad I was carrying proved to be a terrific conversation starter; I would say that I saw only 10 or so people with them. Most people were taking notes by hand, also surprising. The number of laptops in use was higher than iPads and Smartphones, but most people were writing in long hand. When I asked a few folks about it, the reason was cost. More vendors and university press people had devices, most librarians had notepads. Totally fits in with the rampant budget cuts libraries are facing, I imagine. ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................
Pay-Per-View Isn't All Wet: Providing Articles Can Save the Budget with Barbara MacAlpine, Trinity University took up the budget issue. Barbara believes PPV is a magic bullet for budget problems. Trinity cut journals every year because of budget constraints. In 2005 Elsevier journals were too expensive, so they cancelled and went to PPV using ScienceDirect. Four years on, they have saved $640,000 per annum, with no journal cancellations. Usage statistics will be hugely important in many areas: creative budgeting, educating faculty etc. Publishers who offer deals to small libraries will get the accounts. ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................
The Future of eTextbooks - The "Smarter Learning" Approach talked about how textbooks are the last frontier in the eBook revolution. eTextbooks are finally beginning to open up to active experimentation. New business and product models are being explored by major publishers: CourseSmart, CLeBook, CengageBrain, Nook Study, McGraw-Hill's getmytextbooks.org, Google Editions, etc. Students and teachers are looking for accessibility, device-format agnostic, continual assessment, and collaboration.
Governments are getting involved. Libraries are debating centralized purchasing and linking textbooks. Libraries have never really collected textbooks—they tried to separate teaching from research, textbooks were expensive and had a short shelf life. So really the logical place for eTextbooks is courseware, not library holdings. ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................
In the UK, the market for Higher Ed is freeing up. Students want to work anywhere and share resources. The gradeguru.com service which lets you share reading lists and materials is becoming popular.
Ingram, represented here by William Chesser, was in the eBook business before there was one. They struggled for years to find customers, but are now having publishers knocking down their door for help! It is the future and vendors will need to be ready to help.
Other speakers included James Mouw from the University of Chicago and Martin Marlow of Maverick Outsource Services.
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Friday's COUNTER forum, New COUNTER-based Usage Metrics for Journals and Other Publications, was close to my heart, as MPS recently completed a survey of over 300 librarians about COUNTER statistics.
The speakers included David Sommer, an ex-MPS Technologies employee (now consultant to publishing and vendor communities, incoming Chair of COUNTER, and great guy to share a beer with) and Peter Shepherd from COUNTER.
The forum focused on the history of COUNTER and the challenges going forward:
- Measuring usage on mobiles and apps
- Improved accessibility with SUSHI
- Improving the effectiveness of "per-article" or "per-chapter" counts
- New reports for non-text-based content
- Comparing usage across different devices
Since an overall theme of this conference was the need for libraries to buy fewer full journals and books and move toward the patron-driven, pay-per-view models, how will COUNTER...count? They have created PIRUS, which will provide a common standard for measuring online usage of individual articles.
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The last forum I attended, Efficient and Effective Funding of Open Access 'Books', was with Dr. Frances Pinter, currently publisher of Bloomsbury Academic. She was calling on libraries worldwide to form consortia that buy and share books, whether hard copy or print. She believed in open source access and that can be achieved only if the cost to purchase books would be spread among thousands of libraries. She didn't think publishers would be open to slashing their prices just to help cash-strapped libraries.
Rose Rummel-Eury
Sales Manager, MPS North America
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