Thinking About Patron Driven E-book Acquisitions

There is no doubt e-books have become more popular in academic and mainstream publishing.  I vaguely remember reading that during the last Christmas season sales of electronic books exceeded that of print books on Amazon.com. In the past academic librarians purchase books while taking suggestions from students and faculty.  This model has predominated in the early days of e-books.

The librarians at NJIT have mulled over the idea of patron driven e-book acquisitions.  We are thinking of allowing patrons to borrow any electronic they want.  If a book is borrowed five times, the library would purchase the book.  Like everything else, the devil is in the details.  How would we implement this?  In my opinion budgetary constraints would hamper this.  We would not want to offer a service and then retract it when funds dry out.

There are a few reports of how other libraries have implemented this:

The experience of Southern Illinois University Carbondale is doumented in

Nabe, Jonathan., Imre, Andrea. (2011). Let the Patron Drive: Purchase on Demand of E-books. The Serials Librarian, 60, 193-197.

There is a discussion in this blog entry http://edlab.tc.columbia.edu/index.php?q=node/6036

9000 selected MARC records were added to the catalog for student initiated e-book purchases.  If a book was accessed 3 times, purchase was automatically initiated.  470 e-books were purchased in this fashion while 235 were used again after purchase.

A similar initiative at Grand Valley State University in Michigan  was documented at http://www.libraries.wright.edu/noshelfrequired/?p=1099 

They loaded 50,000 EBL records and in 4 months had 2109 STLs at a cost of $20,382 and 160 purchases at a cost of $11,840 for a total of $32,322.

We will discuss this at NJIT in the days and weeks to come.  Hopefully, we will be able to implement some form of patron initiated e-book requests by the fall semester.