Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Use And Cost Analysis Of E-Books: Patron-Driven Acquisitions Plan Vs. Librarian-Selected Titles, Suzanne M. Ward, Rebecca A. Richardson

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

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 …

E-Book Reading Practices In Different Subject Areas: An Exploratory Log Analysis, Robert S. Freeman, E. Stewart Saunders

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Print books pose inherent difficulties for researchers who want to observe users’ natural in-book reading patterns. With e-books and logs of their use it is now possible to track several aspects of users’ interactions inside e-books, including the number and duration of their sessions with an e-book and the order in which pages are viewed. This chapter reports on a study of one-year of EBL user log data from Purdue University to identify different reading patterns or ways in which users navigate within different types of e-books—authored monographs vs. edited collections--and in e-books in different subject areas. The analysis of …

Academic E-Books: Publishers, Librarians, And Users, Suzanne M. Ward, Robert S. Freeman, Judith M. Nixon

Purdue University Press 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.

Read about perspectives on e-books from organizations as diverse as a commercial publisher and an association press. …

Building Library Collections...The Future Collections...Patron Preferences And Electronic Books, Judith M. Nixon

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Nixon's recent research has focused on patron driven acquisitions (PDA). Purdue Libraries was an earlier initiator in buying, instead of borrowing, books patrons requested through interlibrary loan. After ten years of the PDA service Nixon lead a team that did a major analysis of the purchases. She and two other Purdue librarians edited a special issue of Collection Management on this topic. Success in acquiring print materials through this program has led the library to initiate a PDA electronic book acquisition project. This presentation traces the background of PDA and highlights the results of the 10 year study of the …