SPEC Kit 313: E-book Collections · 35
Consortia participation.
Many of the library’s recommending officers can recommend e-books.
Our institutional repository contains both born-digital and digitized print versions of theses.
Re: acquire title-by-title through an approval plan — we do firm orders via our major book vendors and have e-books
integrated into out electronic slips, but we do not currently get any e-books “on approval.”
Replacement for brittle books. Content needed for classroom use. Archival project work on special collections.
Some digitization efforts of library-owned materials have been underway for the last few years.
Vendors lack selections in the arts, math, and engineering. The concern is the quality of the graphics, which must be
very sharp for these disciplines.
We are currently investigating title-by-title selection of e-books and implementing this into our normal collecting
processes.
We are investigating approval and other subject-based plans and packages as well as the various consortial
opportunities. In addition, certain areas are being prioritized for possible in-house digitization efforts. Theses and
dissertations are now born digital.
We are participating in the Open Content Alliance by digitizing books from our collection (pre-1923 imprints).
We prefer aggregator collections since they use one platform for multiple publishers and we then have more control
over the content and can get a better feel for what our users want i.e. we spend several hundred thousand dollars a
year on aggregator e-books.
We receive notification of e-book titles from our Approval Plan vendors but not the e-book itself. We plan to do more
mass digitization in the future. This includes creating e-books from analog collections.
We strongly prefer to “select” our own content rather than acquire publisher-defined packages, but there have been
examples of the latter offerings where the combination of price and content was too good to ignore.
We’ve done some work with OCA, and will be part of the CIC Google project but they have not yet begun work on
our collections.
11. If there is a choice, does the library have a preference for owning vs licensing e-book content?
Check all that apply. N=69
N Individual Titles
N=69
Collections
N=64
Prefer to purchase digital copies 55 52 44
Prefer to license/subscribe to content 15 7 14
No preference 14 14 10
Consortia participation.
Many of the library’s recommending officers can recommend e-books.
Our institutional repository contains both born-digital and digitized print versions of theses.
Re: acquire title-by-title through an approval plan — we do firm orders via our major book vendors and have e-books
integrated into out electronic slips, but we do not currently get any e-books “on approval.”
Replacement for brittle books. Content needed for classroom use. Archival project work on special collections.
Some digitization efforts of library-owned materials have been underway for the last few years.
Vendors lack selections in the arts, math, and engineering. The concern is the quality of the graphics, which must be
very sharp for these disciplines.
We are currently investigating title-by-title selection of e-books and implementing this into our normal collecting
processes.
We are investigating approval and other subject-based plans and packages as well as the various consortial
opportunities. In addition, certain areas are being prioritized for possible in-house digitization efforts. Theses and
dissertations are now born digital.
We are participating in the Open Content Alliance by digitizing books from our collection (pre-1923 imprints).
We prefer aggregator collections since they use one platform for multiple publishers and we then have more control
over the content and can get a better feel for what our users want i.e. we spend several hundred thousand dollars a
year on aggregator e-books.
We receive notification of e-book titles from our Approval Plan vendors but not the e-book itself. We plan to do more
mass digitization in the future. This includes creating e-books from analog collections.
We strongly prefer to “select” our own content rather than acquire publisher-defined packages, but there have been
examples of the latter offerings where the combination of price and content was too good to ignore.
We’ve done some work with OCA, and will be part of the CIC Google project but they have not yet begun work on
our collections.
11. If there is a choice, does the library have a preference for owning vs licensing e-book content?
Check all that apply. N=69
N Individual Titles
N=69
Collections
N=64
Prefer to purchase digital copies 55 52 44
Prefer to license/subscribe to content 15 7 14
No preference 14 14 10
