The Impact Of E-Books On Library Services

The Impact Of E-Books On Library Services. The variety of purchase models is seen as a major problem by many librarians. It is often difficult to differentiate between publishers’ packages, and to decide whether new books are added to the collection as part of an entitlement or have to be purchased individually. Aggregators and e-book vendors are playing important roles in offering books on the market, but some collections contain books that are part of other collections as well. A further problem is the fact that the access of e-books and the receipt of bibliographic records for them is not simultaneous. Sometimes a vendor sells the e-book and provides the record before the book is actually available. 

At other times there is a considerable wait for the vendor to send bibliographic records for books that are already available. Communication from vendors and publishers to libraries is often poor. Many publishers do not advise on updates to their collections. Repeatedly, libraries have not been notified about ceased or superseded titles or changed URLs. Libraries fi nd this out accidentally, usually when library patrons complain that they cannot access an e-book. It is particularly bad when a lecturer chooses an electronic title for recommended reading and halfway through the course, without any notice, the e-book is no longer available. 

This gives the impression that e-books are not a reliable resource. On the other hand, having worked with various vendors over the years I am used to hearing frequent complaints about librarians being inconsistent in their requests. One example would be the definition of necessary MARC  fields for e-book records. Monitoring e-book usage is another difficult area. Not all vendors and publishers provide usage statistics. For libraries with a large number of collections an additional problem is to gather data from different publishers’ platforms to get an overview of total e-book usage. 

Some of the problems libraries have experienced with freely available e-books result from the fact that publishers of free publications never think of libraries as their customers, nor are they aware of libraries administering access to their e-books. They expect users to come to their web pages to find the needed material, or alternatively, to find it via Google. Managing freely available e-books is more time-consuming than managing commercial ones. Publishers of free e-books rarely provide bibliographic records. There will be more on this in the next chapter. 

Here I would just like to point out that many libraries prefer to provide access to e-books via their catalogues, and the lack of bibliographic records means that libraries have to create records themselves. Publishers and providers often change their web domains, and all the links within bibliographic records in library catalogues cease to work. These publishers do not usually advise libraries of additions or deletions to their collections, which is not surprising, as there is hardly any communication between them and libraries. This brings up the issue of preserving access to material that libraries would like to keep for historical reasons. 

Libraries use various methods to ensure that older editions remain available when they are replaced by new ones or withdrawn from websites. All these methods raise issues of copyright and digital rights management. One option is to make printouts and add them to library print collections. This makes those readers happy who prefer print to digital books, but it also means the library loses any digital copy if the provider withdraws it, and any electronic version will have to be re-digitized. Another option is to store a copy on a library server. 

This is an easy and cheap option, but only if the library has plenty of storage space and regards the material as valuable enough to administer in a repository. National storage, or a storage facility belonging to a consortium, is also an alternative. All over the world there are examples of various initiatives of this kind. UK Web Archive, for example, archives websites and the electronic monographs that are part of them. JISC has a digital preservation and records management program me as part of its activities, whose aim is to ensure that UK  universities have continuing access to digital resources created or curated by government, libraries and archives. Digital storage opens another range of questions and issues

 

Is the coverage comprehensive? Is the material accessible to anybody, or is it only a deep archive? To that one should add issues with administration and preservation costs. Over the years libraries have used various tools to manage processes such as acquisition, usage statistics and licences, including spreadsheets, wikis and databases. E-book publishers themselves work continuously on enhancing not only their collections, but also management tools for librarians. 

Following the principle of the ‘one-stop-shop’, Swets Wise has developed its e-books procurement portal as a single source for purchasing e-books, in order to make the process of acquisition easier, and as a means to select the desired access route to their externally sourced content, be it from the publishers directly or via an aggregator. The portal entered into beta testing in November 2009. ILS vendors also offer products to facilitate management, such as Ex Libris Verde. 

Serials Solutions offer a complete set of e-resource management and assessment services and these are very popular as a tool for managing serial subscriptions. Since 2008, they have included e-book management in their 360 Resource Manager. However, the management of e-books remains complex. Many libraries still prefer to put off implementation because of the difficulties  involved and are waiting for various issues to be resolved. Libraries that have implemented e-book collections often complain that dealing with e-books requires too much time.

The question of whether e-books are giving value for money is continually raised. The management of e-books is often compared to the management of print books. One common expectation is that e-books will simplify acquisition and management compared to print books. However, the two media are very different. E-books have opened up new possibilities, and realizing that, libraries not only started to like e-books, but began to ask vendors and publishers to develop solutions that would help them take advantage of them. 

So it would be only fair to say that part of the e-book confusion is due to conflicting requests from libraries. On the other hand, e-book vendors and publishers often offer more than their products can deliver. They advertise and present their collections as something that enables seamless integration into libraries. That might be true for their particular collections, but libraries have other collections too. Maybe our expectations are not realistic and not appropriate for the current level of technology. Maybe the problem is that we expect new technology to be capable of doing anything we would like.

Technology is developing rapidly and we are amazed by new developments every day, but often we forget how many times we have been in a position to see that some software or hardware is actually only ‘wish ware’. The future development of scholarly e-books is very much dependent on both academic libraries and publishers, and on their willingness to cooperate and find solutions that suit them both.

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