Library Collections

As part of our regular collection analysis, we are also incorporating more interlibrary loan data into the mix.  In addition to looking at the serials usage and cost data for current subscriptions, Mary Lucado and I are looking at the journals most often requested through ILL.  The list contains over 400 titles that have had articles requested more than 5 times from July 2010 through November 2013. (Below is a list of the Top 50 most requested titles, some of which we have already recently subscribed).   With the help of intern Brooke Williams, we’ll then look up current subscription costs, publisher names, and determine if and when we have ever had a subscription to that particular journal.  From that point, we will determine whether it’s less expensive to continue to borrow the journal through ILL versus subscribing to the journal. We’ll also determine whether a significant portion of the most requested titles are coming from the same publisher, and, if so, perhaps a package should be considered. Other factors will be considered as data becomes available.

Example: Let’s consider the journal “International Journal of Remote Sensing,” which was borrowed 21 times since July 2010. A rough average cost to borrow an article is about $25.

Computing the ILL cost:  21 (article requests, or use)   X $25 (average cost to borrow)  = $525 (for 3 year period)

This might sound like a good candidate for  a current subscription, but further investigation reveals that this Taylor & Francis titles costs $10,490 for an annual subscription.

Computing 3 year subscription cost: $10,490 + 11,015* + 11,565* = $33,070

*Adjusted for 5% inflation

How long does it take to get an article through ILL?  November’s statistics tell us that 87% of article requests are filled within minutes to 1 week, and nearly 60% of those are filled within 24 hours.

TOP 50 REQUESTED JOURNALS THROUGH INTERLIBRARY LOAN

University Libraries will be acquiring the Cambridge Journals Digital Archive, an archive containing both STEM, and Humanities-Social Sciences journals.  In total, our users will enjoy 255 titles from this package.  A title list can be downloaded from the Cambridge Journals Digital Archive.  Additionally, we will be reviewing recommendations from the Sci-Tech and BHSS teams and hope to add purchases from these lists.  Once both teams complete their reviews, we will provide a list of all new acquisitions since July 1, 2013.

ASERL has just completed its first year with an EBL ebook deal where all ASERL institutions receive a 2% discount for any EBL purchases or short-term loans.  To continue the deal in the future, ASERL members needed to spend collectively $1,000,000 in ebooks or short-term loans for the 2013 calendar year, and we have confirmation that we have surpassed the goal.  Total savings for all schools combined equals roughly $27,000. Not too shabby!

At the Charleston Conference, Ed and I gave a presentation on the performance of DDA (Demand Driven Acquisitions) since we first started the pilot project in May 2012.  For FY 2013, we added a total of 12,805 DDA records to Summon, excluding any VIVA DDA titles.  With those 12,805 titles discoverable, patrons triggered 1204 short-term loans, and almost 70% of those titles were unique, or just experienced 1 short-term loan.  Only 31 titles saw enough short-term loan activity to be purchased outright.  DDA activity has remained steady since FY14 began and we hope to have mid-year report out soon.  Not surprisingly, business, education, and technology titles triggered the biggest share of the usage.

Amongst all this activity, collections staff have also been gathering ebooks usage and cost data in order to understand better the performance and print overlap of ebook packages.  Additionally, just like last January, our team will begin downloading COUNTER journal usage reports so that we can analyze our journal subscriptions.   In other words, more analysis to come in the New Year!

The library has just licensed a new JSTOR collection.  The Arts & Sciences XI Collection features a diverse group of humanities titles, with scholarship in History, Language & Literature, and Art & Art History. Interdisciplinary titles broaden the scope of the collection to cover area studies such as American Studies, Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, African American Studies, Architectural History, and Religion. With content from fifteen countries, Arts & Sciences XI serves scholars, researchers, and students with an interest in region-based humanities.  To date in 2013, 27 new journals to this collection. Notable titles added this year include:

• Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute – published since 1919, this journal includes research, essays and book reviews.
• The Black Scholar (Paradigm Publishers) – the leading journal of black cultural and political thought in the United States.

So far this collection contains in total more than 200,000 articles (equaling nearly 1.4 million pages or approximately 350 linear feet of shelf space savings). To learn more about this collection, please visit http://about.jstor.org/content/arts-sciences-xi

We’re working on yet another shared retention pilot project.  You might remember from earlier posts that we entered an agreement with ASERL on its cooperative print journal retention program, now dubbed Scholar’s Trust.  While Scholar’s Trust focuses on journal retention, our next project will feature monographs and, initially, will involve the following VIVA libraries:  George Mason, Old Dominion, UVA, VCU, JMU, Radford, Germanna Community College, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Mountain Empire Community College, University of Richmond, and Washington & Lee.  More institutions may enter the project later on.  The group has teamed up with Rick Lugg of Sustainable Collection Services, whose product SCS Greenglass provides users with a web application that allows for more systematic, collaborative, data-driven deselection and print retention practices. Just now in its infancy, the group is calculating the number of circulating monographs per institution. Materials excluded from this  project are:  government documents, special collections, microfilm, scores, materials from special libraries, and more.  The next stage involves pulling together title lists for those records and submitted them to SCS.  Greenglass will allow us to compare our titles, in addition to comparing these holdings to Worldcat holdings, HathiTrust holdings, Internet Archive holdings, and titles reviewed in Choice.  Ultimately, Greenglass should help us identify scarcely-held titles needing protection and serve as a starting place in strategic, collaborative weeding.

Here is an update from the ILS Operating Committee with news about the Sierra migration.  For more information about any of the items in this post, please contact one of the ILS Operating Committee co-chairs:  Leslie O’Brien or Curtis Carr.

Attendees found the Sierra training on August 13-14 to be helpful, especially the sessions on Administration and Circulation.  We have several service requests open for Sierra.  If there is no response, call the Help Desk to follow up on the call and provide more information, if available.  A list of the open calls can be found at the bottom of this document.

Sierra Release 1.1.2_5 was installed on Wednesday, 9/11/13.  Hardware for the training server is on order.

Millennium Support Requests are being reviewed to make sure they are still relevant.  Curtis will contact the person who originated the call for verification before requesting that III close the ticket.  Please respond to Curtis if he sends you a call, or close or update the call yourself.

Other:

• SQL access is available for pulling data out of Sierra, looking at data in MS Access.  Annette is working with selected CTS staff to build queries.  She will demonstrate at a future ILS meeting.
• Circulation Notices were not working after Sierra came up, have been working since Aug 31.  SMS (Notices texting service) is not working yet.  A Service Request has been placed.
• ITS is updating the Addison Insider website.  A notice will go out when the site is updated..
• Keith Battleson will join the ILS operating committee.  Support for Sierra has been distributed within ITS.
• Print templates uses Jasper software for setting up templates.  It can be found on CSDirect.  Keith and Jeremiah are assigned to support it.

SIERRA SERVICE REQUESTS OPEN AS OF 9/16/13

As of July 1st the Interlibrary Loan unit moved to the Collections & Technical Services department on the 6th floor to become part of the Electronic Access Team (EAT).

The Borrowing and Lending functions of Interlibrary Loan can be reached at 231-6344 or at ill@vt.edu.

Interlibrary Loan material can be picked up at the Circulation Desk, and a return bin specifically for ILL material is located by the book and media return bins.

The Document Delivery function, which includes Extended Users and Desktop Delivery, remains in Access Services, and is now under the Circulation unit. If you have any questions regarding Document Delivery, you can contact Michele Canterbury at 231-3042.

Mary Lucado

It’s that time of year again!  Beginning next week Collection Management will begin looking usage and cost data related to our journal subscriptions.  Each January and July, Delores McDowell begins the time consuming process of downloading journal usage reports, also known as JR1 COUNTER Reports. (That’s well over 100 JR1 reports.)  JR1s, available to us through vendor/publisher websites, provide Collection Management with the number of successful full-text article requests by month and journal title.  (Click here for our JR1 report from Nature Publishing Group.)  After all the JR1s are downloaded, Brian Craig formats all the spreadsheets identically, then uses an advanced command to consolidate all the reports into one large report. This large report consists of 47,438 journal titles!  We have similar data going back through 2008, thus we can analyze use of these resources from 2008-2012.  In addition to looking at usage, Tracy Gilmore compiles subscription costs for all these same titles, and then computes cost per use for each title.  We then keep an eye out for titles with consistently low usage, or titles with extraordinary high-cost per use coupled by weak usage, and consider cancelling those subscriptions.  Of course, we look at several other factors before deciding to stop a subscription, including the size of the department most likely to be using that particular journal.   Looking at cost and usage data in this way on a regular basis and making cancellations based on this analysis allows us to free up funds to purchase or subscribe to new content for which there is expressed demand. In addition to looking to the JR1 and cost per use data, Ed Lener and I will be looking at circulation data for all of our print standing orders and making similar subscription decisions.

Other COUNTER reports exist, and we do collect and analyze that data, too, along with other data related to ebook and database usage. But more about that next time.

Until then, feel free to ask us questions or provide any comments you might have on cost and usage analysis.

Hi All:

Below is a list of resources University Libraries’ has acquired for its users in fiscal year 2012 – 2013.

Definitely check out our latest purchase—the National Geographic digital archive that dates back to its inception in 1888. 

Databases, Archives, Data sets:

New Individual Journal Subscriptions:

Apidologie

Children, Youth, & Environments Journal

Fusion Science & Technology

Journal for Specialist in Group Work

Journal of African American History

Journal of GLBT Family Studies

Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science

Journal of Planning History

Lake and Reservoir Management

New Political Economy

Nuclear Science and Engineering

Philosophy in the Contemporary World

The Plan: Architecture and Technologies in detail

Centauro SRL

Collections and Technical Services is reorganizing and preparing for the ILL unit to move to the 6th floor.  As a result, many staff will be moving their desks or offices.  Here’s an update on the moves so far:

Staff in Metadata Services (formerly known as Fast Cataloging) are moving to the opposite end of the floor near the Dean’s Suite.
Debbie McAlexander, Linda McCormack and Christy Stanley have moved to vacant workspaces along the windows.
Clyde Kessler, Sara Bebout, and Daryl Robinson will be moving later in the month.
Jana Doyle is sharing an office with Philip Young (Paul Hover’s old space).

Tracy Gilmore is in Room 6086 (near the Dean’s Suite)

Delores McDowell has moved to the cubicle directly across from Leslie O’Brien’s office.

Not all phone lines have been moved yet, so please be patient if you don’t get an immediate response to your call.  We’re doing the moves in phases during June and July in order to minimize impact on the workflow.

If you have books or media to be withdrawn from the collection, you can continue to leave them on the shelving unit near the freight elevator in Christy’s former work space.  We’ll send out more updates as things change.  If you have any questions, please ask Leslie. x4945

Effective today, May 31, 2013, ejournal holdings will no longer display in Addison.  To locate specific journal titles and holdings, search Summon or use the Search feature on the Library Home Page.  All content (print, ejournals, ebooks, media, etc.) is represented in Summon.  Print and media collections will still be updated in Addison and Summon.

A large portion of our ejournal holdings change frequently due to publisher/aggregator agreements and moving walls, making it impossible to keep the catalog completely up to date.  This change to ejournal management will enable us to focus our resources on resolving access problems and improving our assessment initiatives.