Use and Cost Analysis of E-Books: Patron-Driven Acquisitions Plan vs. Librarian-Selected Titles

Many academic libraries have experimented with e-book patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) plans as small projects to test the concept of offering users thousands of titles, yet only paying for them as they are used. At the same time, many librarians continue traditional patterns of buying e-book titles the same way they bought print books for decades – purchasing titles based on their belief that these selections will be ones that local users need. This study shows that many librarian-selected e-book titles suffer the same fate as the traditional model of librarian-selected print books: many receive little or no use. The PDA model is far more effective, both by making large numbers of titles available and by leveraging tight collections budgets. This paper analyzes cost and use factors of three years of data from the Purdue University Libraries’ PDA plan, and examines the same factors for librarian-selected e-books during the same time period. The authors conclude that it may be time to consider moving PDA from its current role as a small ancillary collection development tool to become a major component of an academic library’s monograph collection development program and to suggest that selectors modify their title-by-title selection habits for e-books

International Customers, Suppliers, and Document Delivery in a Fee-Based Information Service

The Purdue University Libraries library fee-based information service, the Technical Information Service (TIS) works with both international customers and international suppliers to meet its customers’ needs for difficult and esoteric document requests. Successful completion of these orders requires the ability to verify fragmentary citations; ascertain documents’ availability; obtain pricing information; calculate inclusive cost quotes; meet customers’ deadlines; accept international payments; and ship across borders. While international orders make up a small percent of the total workload, these challenging and rewarding orders meet customers’ needs and offer continuous improvement opportunities to the staff

Patron-Driven Acquisition: An Introduction and Literature Review

Introductory article to the Special Issue: Patron-Driven Acquisition: Current Successes and Future Direction

Academic E-Books: Publishers, Librarians, and Users

Academic E-Books: Publishers, Librarians, and Users provides readers with a view of the changing and emerging roles of electronic books in higher education. The three main sections contain contributions by experts in the publisher/vendor arena, as well as by librarians who report on both the challenges of offering and managing e-books and on the issues surrounding patron use of e-books. The case study section offers perspectives from seven different sizes and types of libraries whose librarians describe innovative and thought-provoking projects involving e-books. Read about perspectives on e-books from organizations as diverse as a commercial publisher and an association press. Learn about the viewpoint of a jobber. Find out about the e-book challenges facing librarians, such as the quest to control costs in the patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) model, how to solve the dilemma of resource sharing with e-books, and how to manage PDA in the consortial environment. See what patron use of e-books reveals about reading habits and disciplinary differences. Finally, in the case study section, discover how to promote scholarly e-books, how to manage an e-reader checkout program, and how one library replaced most of its print collection with e-books. These and other examples illustrate how innovative librarians use e-books to enhance users’ experiences with scholarly works.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks/1036/thumbnail.jp

Introduction to Academic E-Books

With so many advantages, it seems logical that librarians would be eager to switch from purchasing books in print to embrace the electronic format. However the transition to e-books in academic libraries has not been a smooth or quick one and the reasons are myriad and complicated. Aware that this is still a time of transition and that there are many issues surrounding the e-book, the editors set out to present the state of e-books in academic libraries today. They invited knowledgeable publishers and librarians to write about the current challenges, successes, and trends. In addition, there is a section that analyzes new data about user interaction with e-books and an essay written by a teaching faculty member who uses and encourages her student to use e-book

Notes on Operations: One Title, Hundreds of Volumes, Thousands of Documents: Collaborating to Describe the Congressional Serial Set

As part of its participation in the Google Books government documents scanning project, the Purdue University Libraries agreed to contribute volumes of the Congressional Serial Set (CSS). Realizing that the results would be far more useful if the individual documents within this title were cataloged separately, librarians developed procedures to create brief records and began cataloging CSS documents from the 1890s. The University of Iowa became a partner in this collaborative pilot project, and its cataloging staff used the Purdue template and procedures to create records from the CSS for individual documents from two years in the 1890s. Purdue staff used those records to barcode their own corresponding CSS documents before sending those volumes to Google for scanning. Staff subsequently loaded the records into WorldCat to improve discoverability for scholars. The result of the collaborative cataloging effort was the ability to prepare CSS volumes for scanning quickly and efficiently

Academic E-Books

Academic E-Books: Publishers, Librarians, and Users provides readers with a view of the changing and emerging roles of electronic books in higher education. The three main sections contain contributions by experts in the publisher/vendor arena, as well as by librarians who report on both the challenges of offering and managing e-books and on the issues surrounding patron use of e-books. The case study section offers perspectives from seven different sizes and types of libraries whose librarians describe innovative and thought-provoking projects involving e-books

Downflow Limestone Beds for Treatment of Net-Acidic, Oxic, Iron-Laden Drainage from a Flooded Anthracite Mine, Pennsylvania, USA: 2. Laboratory Evaluation

Acidic mine drainage (AMD) containing elevated concentrations of dissolved iron and other metals can be neutralized to varying degrees by reactions with limestone in passive treatment systems. We evaluated the chemical and mineralogical characteristics and the effectiveness of calcitic and dolomitic limestone for the neutralization of net-acidic, oxic, iron-laden AMD from a flooded anthracite mine. The calcitic limestone, with CaCO3 and MgCO3 contents of 99.8 and \u3c0.1 wt%, respectively, and the dolomitic limestone, with CaCO3 and MgCO3 contents of 60.3 and 40.2 wt%, were used to construct a downflow treatment system in 2003 at the Bell Mine, a large source of AMD and baseflow to the Schuylkill River in the Southern Anthracite Coalfield, in east-central Pennsylvania. In the winter of 2002–2003, laboratory neutralization-rate experiments evaluated the evolution of effluent quality during 2 weeks of continuous contact between AMD from the Bell Mine and the crushed calcitic or dolomitic limestone in closed, collapsible containers (cubitainers). The cubitainer tests showed that: (1) net-alkaline effluent could be achieved with detention times greater than 3 h, (2) effluent alkalinities and associated dissolution rates were equivalent for uncoated and Fe(OH)3-coated calcitic limestone, and (3) effluent alkalinities and associated dissolution rates for dolomitic limestone were about half those for calcitic limestone. The dissolution rate data for the cubitainer tests were used with data on the volume of effuent and surface area of limestone in the treatment system at the Bell Mine to evaluate the water-quality data for the first 1.5 years of operation of the treatment system. These rate models supported the interpretation of field results and indicated that treatment benefits were derived mainly from the dissolution of calcitic limestone, despite a greater quantity of dolomitic limestone within the treatment system. The dissolution-rate models were extrapolated on a decadal scale to indicate the expected decreases in the mass of limestone and associated alkalinities resulting from the long-term reaction of AMD with the treatment substrate. The models indicated the calcitic limestone would need to be replenished approaching the 5-year anniversary of treatment operations to maintain net-alkaline effluent quality