Library expands digital offerings

E-books and e-book readers are among new products available for loan

by JOSEPH BONNER

When publishers first began to offer digital content, electronic access was typically available for just slightly more than a print subscription. Today, according to university librarian Carol Feltes, subscribing to the electronic version is the standard. This spring, the Rita and Fritz Markus Library announces several new initiatives — including the availability of Kindle e-book readers — that Ms. Feltes hopes will provide the library’s users with better access to this ever-expanding digital universe.

Two years ago, the library whittled its print subscriptions down to only 55 titles, retaining what some library staff members believed was a “core” selection of popular titles that people would still visit the library to pore through. “We had regular visitors who came to do nothing more than look at print issues and browse through them,” she says. “But over the past two years there has been less and less of this activity. We eventually realized that we were shelving many things that were rarely, if ever, touched again.”

Libraries in general have been moving from print to digital. The labor required to receive, process, shelve and manage print journals has become more than shrinking library budgets and staff could bear, says Ms. Feltes. But perhaps more importantly, the shift to digital collections has allowed librarians to better track usage patterns and tailor their offerings to their clients’ needs. Based on that data, the university’s library recently canceled subscriptions to 73 journal titles — some of which were small collections of electronic titles that were subscribed to in a group — that were receiving little access. Twenty-three new titles were added.

“All new subscriptions are digital, unless there is no electronic format available, which is rare,” says Ms. Feltes.

The library has also added links to Web-based subscriptions of e-books, as well as individual titles that can be downloaded to personal computers or e-book readers. And it recently launched a pilot project under which four Amazon Kindle2s, each pre-loaded with 25 popular science titles ranging from a textbook on nonlinear dynamics to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, are available for loan. If the pilot is successful, the program may be expanded.
Finally, the university has expanded its access to backup electronic services that help ensure online archival content remains available even if publishers disappear or Web sites go permanently dark. Last month, the university joined a not-for profit academic library collaborative archive called CLOCKSS, which focuses on scholarly science, technology and mathematics titles. CLOCKSS is decentralized and geographically disparate to provide increased security for archived content. The service turns on access to a particular title, making it freely available to all subscribers, only if there is a “triggering” event, such as a publication going out of print. The university pays about $600 a year for its subscription and has status as a voting member of the collaborative.

The CLOCKSS service augments the university’s existing subscription to Portico/JSTOR, which provides access to popular titles like Scientific American, New Scientist and Bioscience. Like CLOCKSS, trigger events make orphaned content available for free to members. It costs about $4,000 per year. “These services are cheap risk management to ensure that content you have been diligently paying for year after year doesn’t suddenly disappear,” Ms. Feltes says.