SPEC Kit 313: E-book Collections · 59
26. If your library tracks the use of e-book collections, has the trend in use over the past three years
increased, decreased, or stayed about the same? N=52
Increased 46 88%
Decreased 2 4%
Stayed about the same 4 8%
Please enter any additional comments on e-book collections usage monitoring/tracking at your
library. N=23
Increased
Anecdotal evidence from staff observation and patron comments. We have not done systematic analysis of use
statistics.
I’m not sure we’ve been tracking this long enough to determine a trend. But because offerings of e-books have
increased over time, I think we can safely assume that use has increased as well.
It is clear the presence of MARC records in the catalog drives a significant amount of our usage.
Our usage has always been high and our increase in usage in recent years has almost all been related to an increase
in the amount of e-book content.
Slight increase in use for NetLibrary e-books, but need more data for other collections.
This is also a bit misleading. Collections where we have significant DRM, e.g., Safari and NetLibrary, are seeing a
decrease in use. However, we do not know if this is because this content is older (in the case of NetLibrary) or needs
to be exchanged for newer editions (in the case of Safari). Or if users are looking to our content with less intrusive
DRM as it is just easier for them to use. Usage on some of our other content is frankly going through the roof, but
then again, usage also increases as we provide more e-books for them to use.
Usage doubled in last two years.
Use is still a work in progress, however indicators clearly show increased use,
We do not track subject areas per se, but we purchase the most e-books in health sciences, and these do get high
use. We have found that since COUNTER-compliant e-book statistics are not available for may vendors, we get what
we can. However, this makes it difficult to do fruitful analysis, especially for resources like Books 24x7 and NetLibrary.
We have been tracking usage in collections, but so far have not made a concerted effort to track them for individually
purchased e-books.
We have only started to evaluate usage. Have not tracked this over time, but plan to do more evaluation in the future.
We only monitor what we get from publishers or aggregators. Trend isn’t real clear because we don’t have good
enough data.
We’re continually offering more content, obviously usage will increase.
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