SPEC Kit 313: E-book Collections · 33
In some cases, the content became unavailable (after records had been added to the catalog).
No policy on deselection. Decisions differ, based on pricing, ongoing costs, currency of content. Have not deselected
many e-books, but as budgets tighten subscribed collections will be subject to review.
Our only de-selection of e-books has been a part of a pilot project where a large number of e-book titles were loaded
into the ILS as available patrons clicking on and entering an e-book twice purchased the book. At the end of the
pilot project we de-selected all of the e-books not purchased.
Technical e-Books have been de-selected when subject specialist deems the subject matter obsolete, or a new edition
has been released.
The Discarding of Library Materials policy does not mention e-books specifically but it applies to the de-selection of
all library materials. Generally, the same principles apply as with the discarding of print books, though with e-books
acquired through the participation in a consortium the needs of the consortium members will also be taken under
consideration.
The kinds of things we take into consideration in de-selecting e-books don’t differ greatly from our considerations
in de-selecting print materials, so why would we need to have a separate policy? And in the case of e-books and
e-book collections that we rent rather than own, we’re making a decision at the point of selection that we don’t
intend to retain these titles beyond the point where we’re getting a good return on investment.
The only e-book collection we have where active deselecting is taking place is Safari Tech Books. We swap new/
requested titles for low-use titles in our collection.
The only product we currently have involving deselection is Safari tech books and deselection is performed by the
subject selector for that particular content.
There is no policy but the software collection permits replacement of titles and the selector responsible does this and
responds to suggestions from colleagues for new content to add. We have some ABC-Clio titles on a 7-year lease. We
expect to go looking for the others when the first link is reported dead.
We do not have an explicit policy for e-books. We have one for print books and some of the same factors would
apply. Since this is relatively new, we have not paid much attention to deselection of this format. However, if a
collection is not used and it is a subscription model, we would most likely cancel.
We don’t have a policy or formal process for deselection.
We endeavor to maintain long-term access so we have not been concerned about deselection.
We have no written policy on deselection of e-books, but with current budget problems, we have looked at usage
data for subscription collections and have cancelled a lower use collection.
We tend not to deselect any titles in our collection, print or electronic. As an extension of that, we don’t deselect
e-books.
Weeding materials, regardless of format, is part of the collection development responsibilities of all selectors.
We haven’t had enough titles or had them for long enough to be deselecting.
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