james hardiman library a library for the 21st century - is e-only finally a possibility? monica...

James Hardiman Library

A library for the 21st Century - is e-only finally a possibility?

Monica Crump & Neil O’Brien


One library’s attempt to go e-only

• Evolution of e-journals at NUI Galway

• Budgetary, storage and staffing drivers

• Print to Electronic Journal Project

How we did it

What we achieved


NUI Galway

• University Mission: “Learning and Leadership for Life and Work”

• Strategic focus on excellence in both research and teaching

• Almost 17,000 students (12,500 FTEs)

• Broad range of subjects

• Sunday Times University of the Year 2009

http://www.nuigalway.ie/about-us/news-and-events/university-of-the-year.html



• Collections: 500,000 printed books 30,000 journal titles 350,000 electronic books Special Collections and Archives

• Tradition of being early adopters of new technologies: Online A/I services E-journals Link Resolver & Federated Search Engine - SFX/Metalib Primo


Evolution of E-journals Availability

• Starting Point (2000): JSTOR, Science Direct, Business Source Premier, 311 e-

journals

• Gradual Increase (2002-):Print + Electronic combined subscriptionsFull-text publisher bundles

• IReL (2004-)


IReL – Irish Research eLibrary

• Research a key strategic priority for the Irish Government

• Science Foundation Ireland founded in 2000 first substantial State source of funding for research.

• Lack of information resources soon identified as an issue.

• Senior Researchers and the University Librarians lobbied successfully for funding for an e-Library to support research.

• IReL was born!


IReL – Irish Research eLibrary

• IReL delivers quality, peer-reviewed, online research publications direct to the desktop of University researchers.

• Range and quality of publications comparable to leading research libraries, incl. MIT, Columbia University and Imperial College London.


IReL – Progressive Development

2004 Funding of Science, Technology and Medicine eLibrary (particular focus on Biotechnology and I.T.)

2005 Expansion of eLibrary to other areas of STM

2006 Funding of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

03/04 04/05 05/06 06/07 08/09

No. of IReL e-jrls 2904 4765 15903 22481 24086


No. of IReL e-journals

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

03/04 04/05 05/06 06/07 07/08

Increasing number of IReL e-journals


Impact on Journals accessible to NUI Galway

NUI Galway Journal Holdings

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

35000

02/03 03/04 04/05 05/06 06/07 07/08 08/09

print journals

e-journals


Evolution of Attitudes to e-Journals

• Critical mass of e-journal availability very positive affect on acceptance of e-journals as a

reliable alternative to print and attitudes towards them.

• Collection Management Policy has grown ever more certain in its directionpreference for electronic vs. print journals.

• Surveys have shown a concomitant shift in attitude towards e-journals amongst academic staff and researchers.


Changing Policy - 2003

• Collection Management Policy February 2003: “The Library will purchase and retain an item in only one format

unless there is a particularly strong case to do otherwise.”

• However, the same policy also stated: “Electronic journals provide possibilities for wider access; the

Library aims to supplement existing print subscriptions by making available the online version where possible. The viability of completely online access is explored on a case-by-case basis, a key factor being the publisher’s commitment to online archiving.”



• Revision to Collection Management Policy November 2004: “A subscription to any title should only encompass one

publication format…. Electronic journals provide possibilities for wider access and reduced overheads. The viability of completely online access is explored on a case-by-case basis, key factors being the publisher’s commitment to online archiving and proposed conditions of access.”



• Collection Management Policy – Jan. 2009 “The Library recommends online subscription over

print where available, because of the improved accessibility offered by electronic journals both on and off campus, the speedier availability of latest issues, and the reduced storage and handling costs involved. The viability of completely online access is explored on a case-by-case basis, key factors being the publisher’s commitment to online archiving and proposed conditions of access.”


Changing Attitudes – Surveys

• Cycle of surveys of NUI Galway researchers

academic staff, researchers, research and taught postgraduates

• 2003, 2005 and 2008 surveys show a marked change of attitude towards online information generally and journals specifically.


Change in how library services are accessed

Visits to the Library

0.00%5.00%

10.00%15.00%

20.00%

25.00%30.00%35.00%

40.00%45.00%

2003 2005 2008

Daily online visit

Daily physical visit

2003 2005 2008

Daily online visit 25.90% 36.10% 42.00%

Daily physical visit 8.50% 6.50% 4.00%


Change in frequent use of journals

Frequent Use of Journals

0.00%

20.00%

40.00%

60.00%

80.00%

100.00%

2003 2005 2008

Online Journals

Printed Journals

2003 2005 2008

Online Journals 77.20% 80.80% 89.10%

Printed Journals 45.40% 41.90% 36.60%


Increase in Satisfaction with Journals

Satisfied with Journals

0.00%

10.00%

20.00%

30.00%

40.00%

50.00%

60.00%

70.00%

80.00%

90.00%

2003 2005 2008

Online Journals

Printed Journals


Online Information Makes Physical Collections less Important

Online information makes physical collections less important

0.00%

10.00%

20.00%

30.00%

40.00%

50.00%

60.00%

70.00%

80.00%

2003 2005 2008

Agree

Disagree


Different Trend in Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences

Online information makes physical collections less important - AHSS responses

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

2003 2005 2008

Agree

Disagree


Drivers to take the e-only plunge

• Staffing issues

• E-journal management issues

• Budgetary restrictions

• Storage space restrictions


Staffing Issues

2004 Journals Staffing

• Print: 3 FTE Library Assistants

• Electronic: 1 Assistant Librarian Electronic Resources

2009 Journals Staffing

• Print: 2.6 FTE Library Assistants

• Electronic: 1 Assistant Librarian Electronic Resources with assistance from AL Collection Management and AL Cataloguing


E-Journal Management

• Insufficient staff numbers to ensure full accuracy of e-journal linking and holdings information

• Reactive – errors corrected as they are reported by staff and students

• No ‘check-in’ equivalent

• Given level of investment, this is no longer satisfactory


But, print still required work

YearNo. of Print Subs

No. of Issues Received

% Change no. of Subs

% Change no. of Issues

2003/2004 2170 13543

2004/2005 2016 12844 -7% -5%

2005/2006 1936 12643 -4% -2%

2006/2007 1672 7293 -14% -42%

2007/2008 1622 10661 -3% 46%

2008/2009 1438 8943 -11% -16%

Change 2003 - 2008 -25% -21%


Budgetary Restrictions

• National Economic Situation:

Public Finances in deficit

Cuts in University Budgets

Public Sector Moratorium on Recruitment


NUI Galway Response

• Significant cut in non-pay budgets, two years running

• Guidelines to Schools and Units include:Eliminate duplication of content between print and online

formats Develop a policy towards use of online journals only,

which reduce the need to bind, cost less and do not require expensive storage space

Optimize use of existing resources, i.e. best use to be made of existing staff and space


Storage Space Restrictions

• James Hardiman Library and off site storage now officially full!

• Essential to rationalise what we hold in print so as to allow room for new acquisitions

• JSTOR print holdings have now been discarded, further similar projects planned

• Can we justify continuing to add print journal issues?


Time was ripe!

• Increased acceptance of and satisfaction with e-journals

• Increasing dissatisfaction internally with how we managed e-journals

• Journals staff resource not being put to best use

• Storage space a critical issue

The time was ripe for a move to e-only ….

Situation leading up to the project

Year No. of Subscriptions

% E-Only

2007 1616 7%

2009 1618 17.36%

Increasing proportion of e-only

The percentage of electronic only titles increased because of a number of factors:-

• an increasing number of publishers began to decouple and remove free electronic access with a print subscription

• Swets notices alerted us to titles which could be renewed as electronic only and decoupled from print

• New subscriptions from 2007 were taken out as electronic only. In the budget year 2007-2008 of the 46 titles added to the collection 30 were purchased as online only


Extent of e-only prior to 2009

Breakdown of Faculties:

• Law 8.9% electronic only;

• Arts 13.3% electronic only;

• Business and Economics 27.45% electronic only;

• Engineering 27.45% electronic only;

• Medicine 16.9% electronic only;

• Science 19.87% electronic only;

• General Library 29.84% electronic only;


Pilot Print to Electronic Project 2007

• Publishers increasingly adopting a flexible approach to decoupling print and electronic

• In 2007 we attempted to look at moving titles to e only

• Two academic departments were piloted, one STM and one AHSS


Pilot Print to Electronic Project 2007

• STM Dept.:

24 journal subscriptions

9 available as e-only

But only 3 had guaranteed post-cancellation access

• AHSS Dept.:

57 journal subscriptions

14 available as e-only

But again only 3 had guaranteed post-cancellation access


Developments in 2009

• Elsevier

Consortial agreement for Science Direct Freedom Collection due for renegotiation

Up to 2009 under the terms of agreement 96 titles were required to be kept as part of a maintain spend

Under the new agreement titles could be renewed as electronic only with full post cancellation archival access


Developments in 2009

• LWW

33 LWW print and electronic subscriptions renewed as e-only directly with Ovid/Wolters Kluwer in Summer 2009

• UKSG 2009

Discussions with publishers re decoupling print and electronic and post-cancellation access

Vast majority had policies allowing both


IReL Deduplication

• 155 print subscriptions still held to titles available electronically through IReL

• In some cases we had failed to spot the duplications due to the out of date publisher information in our catalogue

• The IReL model license had a clause covering post cancellation access

• These 155 titles were cancelled in print


Print to Electronic Project

• In total 284 titles had moved to electronic only by the beginning of the Summer of 2009

• This left 1334 titles left to be considered of whom some were already electronic only

• The feedback from UKSG in 2009 seemed to indicate that publisher’s policies were changing in regard to post cancellation access and allowing the decoupling of P&E

• We decided to directly survey all publishers directly


Criteria for moving to e-only

• Based on our experience up to that point, we decided that the most important criteria would be :-

Perpetual post cancellation access

Involvement in dark archiving initiatives such as LOCKKS and Portico

Technical considerations (e.g. IP authentication)

Cost


Perpetual Post-Cancellation Access

• During 2007 pilot academics had voiced concerns about cancelling print and whether e-only subscriptions would allow long term (including post cancellation) access to titles

• According to research by Stemper and Barribeau this is not a concern unique to us.


Perpetual Post-Cancellation Access

• 2003 survey of 7,400 US university faculty members

• 75% said a journal should ensure that its archives be preserved indefinitely.

• 84% of respondents said that the archiving of electronic resources was important to them

Jim Stemper and Susan Barribeau Perpetual Access to Electronic Journals – a survey taken of one Academic

Library’s licenses, 52 (2) LRTS


Perpetual post-Cancellation access

• The Digital Library Federation (DLF) Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) defines a perpetual access right as ‘the right to permanently access the licensed materials paid for during the period of the licence agreement’

• This was set as our primary criterion

• The publisher should also state their policy in regard dark archiving such as Portico, LOCKSS & CLOCKSS


Technical Criteria

• Full IP authentication

• Off campus access via Proxy server

• Open URL compliant

• Subscription provided through our agent Swets

Other Criteria

• E-access via an aggregator was not considered sufficiently secure to enable print cancellation

• Titles should be published on a dedicated publisher platform or a tried and tested hosting platform such as Ingenta or Metapress.

• We decided early in the project that difference in cost between print and electronic should not be a significant factor in our decision to change format.


Communicating with the Publishers

• Didn’t use Swets for bulk of the project as we thought direct access to the publisher would result in a prompt reply to all of our queries.

• Model email was drawn up and sent directly to each of the publishers - very time consuming.

• Swets could not provide us with a contact name in the publishing houses due to data protection.

• Contacts and publisher information were found on Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory and on Google – very time consuming.


Communicating with the Publishers

• Replies very slow.

• Regular reminders and follow up emails needed.

• By late July called in Swets to help with any non-responding publishers


Communicating with the Academic Community

• IReL experience of academic reactions to proposals to cancel print duplication.

• We based our arguments on the savings made to the University in terms of space, staff time, binding and management

• Support from the University Management Team and the Library Senior Management Team to bring this electronic Journals project to the fore.

• Vested ourselves with armour to protect ourselves from undue criticism of the project from Faculties and Departments. Most of academics were receptive to these arguments however a number of issues emerged during the consultation process.


Communicating with the Academic Community

• Academic community informed of planned print cancellations and given time to submit any pleas for retention.

• Collection Management Committee considered any issues raised by academics and made final decision

• Overall the responses sent to the Committee were very positive and few objections were made. Those that were presented made strong arguments and these were accepted where a good case was made.


Issues raised by the Academic Community

• A prestigious and old collection

• Accreditation

• Image Quality

• Core Titles


A prestigious and old collection

• Some academics bemoaned the cancellation of a print collection which stretched back to the foundation of the University in the middle of the 19th Century.

• In the JSTOR discarding project the Collection Management Committee agreed to retain some back-runs that were considered important to the history of the University.

• However, our policy now is that our preference for current journal access is electronic.

• Therefore, no title for moving to electronic qualified under this heading


Accreditation

• Academics argued that external accreditation bodies (in particular for professional qualifications such as Nursing or Law) require print holdings of key professional journals


Accreditation

• “One issue bothers me - a number of programmes … have the benefit of - and indeed market - the fact that they are accredited by outside bodies. In some cases accreditation is dependent on adequate Library stocks, and I doubt if general e-access in itself would be sufficient. … As our Law programmes will be up for accreditation again soon, I would feel happier if re-assured that what is proposed will not hinder the retention of accreditation.”

One Law Lecturer’s response to proposal to cancel print


Accreditation

• After taking this on board we researched the policies laid down by the UK accreditation bodies for Law and found that there was no objection to replacing traditional print with electronic only

• Extract from Society of Legal Scholars Indicative list of sources for Law Libraries:“In only a few selected instances is a particular format for a title specified. The choice of the format in which legal materials are provided in universities and colleges is left to individual law schools and law libraries to decide, in the light of local circumstances.”


Accreditation

• International research appears to justify our approach.

• E-Serials and accreditation was considered at the University of Oklahoma by Cheryl MaCain and Karen Rupp-Serrano (see Gwen M. Gregory Getting a Grip on Electronic Journals Information today – April 2004)

• They surveyed six United States regional accrediting agencies to find out how the Boards accounted for electronic journals in their evaluations.

• This research revealed that the move to qualitative and output measures made the number of titles in an institution less important regardless of format.

• Most agencies did not appear to have specific standards for e-journals and authors tended to recommend that Libraries stay focused on demonstrating quality improvement in the light of their institution’s mission and goals


Image Quality

• It was our view that graphics would have higher definition online and that e-journals provided great advantage in terms of both text and graphics as they could be enlarged.

• However, the Dept. of Archaeology voiced some concerns about particular journals that contained a significant amount of original archaeological illustration, plans, maps, drawings etc. that did not reproduce well electronically.

• Investigation and a comparison of the print and online journals showed those concerns to be well-founded!


Image Quality

• Research in other Libraries shows that discrepancies arise in electronic journals in regard to color and graphics.

• One survey found that whilst few online journals did not contain graphics:

some did not display the graphics due to incorrect URLs for the images.

Some color images in print were displayed as black and white images online, rendering the content useless

the quality of color varied among journals Carolyn Henebry, Ellen Safley, Sarah E. George

'Before You Cancel the Paper, Beware', The Serials Librarian, 42: 3, 267 — 273


Image Quality

• We agreed that we would accept this as a criteria for exempting a title from going e-only

• Of course it should be noted that most leading journal providers are not only supplying high quality graphics in their e-journal equivalents, but providing added-value online by offering 3D quality images and indeed multimedia add-ons to articles that could never be delivered in print.


Core titles

• The Medical Library voiced concerns about removing print versions of core titles such as JAMA, the Lancet, the BMJ and the New England Journal of Medicine.

• This was considered a valid consideration and was duly accepted.

• No other Faculty made an argument for retention based on the grounds of core titles.


Situation prior to the project

• Our total number of serial subscriptions at the beginning of 2009 was 1618

• 1337 (82.63%) titles were print only or print & electronic

• 281 (17.36%) of our total journal subscriptions were e-only


Stage 1 of the Project

• 155 IReL duplicates cancelled

• 96 Elsevier titles moved to e-only

• 33 LWW titles moved to e-only

• Total 284 e-only titles following Stage 1


Stage 2 of the Project

• 1053 titles remained for consideration and emails were sent directly to the publishers

• 617 publisher replies were received

• 380 titles not available as e-only, couldn’t be decoupled from print or did not meet the set criteria

• 237 titles were converted to e-only at this stage

• No answers were received for 436 titles


Results

• Excluding the 155 IReL cancellations 366 titles were shifted to e-only

• In total we now have 683 electronic only subscriptions from various providers

• An additional 36 e titles were added by breaking up former print group subscriptions

• In total we now have 1510 subscriptions from various providers

• 436 subscription titles will be surveyed again prior to our next renewal in the Summer of 2010


Results


Situation prior to the project


Situation after the project


Results


Results

• In all 521 (35.61%) of the total Serials collection were affected by the project

• Slightly less than 50% of AHSS titles are now electronic only

• 65% of STM titles are now e-only, with Medicine performing the best


Cost Implications

• Many big publishers offer e-only at 100% and print at 110%, so in some cases the publishers price was reduced!

• In Ireland the cost for electronic only is amplified by VAT rates however:

Print 13.5%

Electronic 21%

• Therefore in most cases the cost of e-only will be higher than print.


Cost Implications

• Some electronic titles are more expensive than print. Some examples with the increase in price to go e-only follow:-

Mosby’s Journal of Paediatrics + 79%

American Economic Review + 71%

American Historical Review (University of Chicago) + 61%

Journal of Health Services Research & Policy (RSC) + 28%

Public Archaeology (Maney Publishers) + 7%


Cost implications

• No significant trends emerge to demonstrate a divergence between STM and AHSS titles in terms of difference in price

• We decided from a philosophical perspective that cost would not be a consideration and the project was seen as a long term investment which would deliver far more ultimate cost savings with regard to environment and staff work practices.

• The costs associated with print far outweigh electronic in terms of shelf space, staff time in claiming, checking in, and finally binding.


Follow up work

• Old print (or print + electronic) order records had to be closed and new orders created reflecting new format.

• Holdings statements had to be updated to show end of print run.

• The third phase involved updating the records with the new access URL, entering correct 856 fields in Marc and activating the titles on the appropriate SFX portfolio

• Difficulty of up-skilling print oriented staff to work in the e-environment cannot be underestimated.


A word of caution

• Because our renewal process was so complex this year it took Swets a good deal of time to finish our renewals and this is still a work in progress but nearly complete.

• Changes of this scale were difficult for Swets and renewals were not actioned as quickly as we might have liked and some of our renewals are still outstanding.

• Libraries considering a similar move should be aware of the need to allow sufficient time for their agent to make changes.


Conclusion

• This project is a legacy project in so far as it will change utterly the emphasis of our serials collection. Our collections have been carefully built up over the last 150 years and the emphasis for this period was on print. However after the projects completion at the end of this Summer it is hoped that we will have changed over 75% of our journal titles to electronic only. From this perspective we are essentially starting again, moving away from practices which began in the 19th century and creating a library for the 21st Century.


Contact Details

• Monica Crump, Head of Information Access and Learning Services,James Hardiman Library, NUI [email protected]

• Neil O’Brien,Collection Management Librarian,James Hardiman Library, NUI [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

james hardiman library a library for the 21st century - is e-only finally a possibility? monica...

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james hardiman library

number of irel ejournals

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ejournals critical mass

acceptance of e

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e journals gradual increase