rebuilding the plane while flying: library/vendor strategies for approval plan revision (in a dda...
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Charles Hillen (speaker), Glenn Johnson-Grau (speaker), Joan Thompson (speaker)TRANSCRIPT
Rebuilding the Plane While Flying: Library/Vendor Strategies for Approval
Plan Revision (in a DDA World)
Charles Hillen, Head of Acquisitions & Serials, Loyola Marymount UniversityGlenn Johnson-Grau, Head of Collection Development, Loyola Marymount University
Joan Thompson, Collection Development Manager, YBP Library Services
About Loyola Marymount University
A mid-sized Master’s L institution located on the West side of Los Angeles.
One of the twenty-eight Jesuit institutions in the U.S.
6100 undergraduates and about 2200 graduate students; the affiliated Loyola Law School is located near downtown Los Angeles.
Collection Development at LMU Liaison model
22 librarians are liaisons/selectors for one or more academic program
Advantages: Large group with diverse knowledge and expertise
CD responsibilities written into job descriptions
Disadvantages: Liaison work not a primary job responsibility
Librarians frequently don’t have much CD experience
Schedules full from primary responsibilities
Maintaining a well-informed and engaged company of liaisons is a continuous challenge.
New Directions New Dean and Head of CD agreed: program needed to
become more intentional and less dependent on faculty involvement
Trials and Lessons Learned: Have liaisons revise and/or create individual departmental
collection development policies
FAIL
Expertise of the liaisons was not uniformly advanced enough
First attempt to involve liaisons in revising our approval profile
Struggled for the same reasons noted with the CD policies
Attempts to provide information to all the liaisons in a large group meeting were also unsuccessful
Putting Peas In Pods
Solution: We needed a forum that met regularly in small groups for training
Raise all the liaisons to a uniform level of expertise
Encourage discussion of concerns about collection development activities
Thus, the Pods:
Four groups of 4-6 liaisons
Organized around broad subjects
Monthly meetings
The Pods have been meeting since the spring of 2011
Basic processes, workflows and technical training
Collection development concepts, goals and foci
Development and/or application of subject expertise
The Approval Plan Profile Created in the mid-1990s
Many minor changes since, but no systematic review
Major flaws with the old plan
Significant areas within classification ranges, particularly in the sciences, were excluded for no discernable reason
Conception and contraception in RG
Innumerable areas were set to receive slips, even in areas of curricular focus and collection strength
Unexpected discoveries in the analysis process
Bioethics in R-class (and elsewhere)
Wait a Sec…What About E-Books?
At about the time that we started this process, we also piloted our first Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) plan
Built upon our ebrary Academic Complete subscription
We had to think long and hard:
Why invest the time in revising our approval profile if we were going to let patrons select materials?
Was an approval plan an anachronism in a DDA world?
Nothing succeeds like excess. – Oscar Wilde
Why Continue Approval and Selection?
Buy it when you can (is e-access guaranteed?) Bob Nardini in “Approval Plans and Patron Selection”
Local expertise matters “Patron-Driven Acquisition and Circulation” by Tyler, et al.
For now, format matters to our patrons; therefore it should matter to us.
Known unknowns and unknown unknowns; burned by aggregator content in early years of full text databases.
There is still a lot we don’t know.
Observe moderation. -- Hesiod
Redefined Goals For liaisons (and faculty):
Reduction in slips and time spent reviewing slips
Invest time now to save time later
For Acquisitions (and Cataloging and Circulation) Reduction of backlogs/Stabilized workflows
Consistent and reliable spending
Reduce process labor
Accelerate receipt of desired material
Receive roughly 70% of our print book purchase on approval and 30% on firm orders Flip the old ratio
Additional Goals Provide a framework for moving the needle from
print purchasing to e-books, both firm and DDA
To feel confident that our approval-to-firm order ratio would be within broad parameters that we had set through our systematic approval plan review
Begin a pilot project for going e-preferred through the approval plan for certain academic disciplines
Getting Started In consultation with our YBP representative, we
outlined a plan for a full revision
Cautionary factors:
Desired granularity of our decision making with the dual challenges --AND
Had to educate each liaison on the process – AND
Had to manage the time constraints of each meeting
YBP’s Role YBP approval profiling and Collection Development
Manager’s role
LMU’s process more involved than typical profiling project More time onsite; more involvement in process
More involvement in decision making
An excellent opportunity to be present while intensive collection development work was being carried out
LMU approval is expanding and becoming comprehensive while the trend is toward contraction and/or shift to DDA
YBP’s Role Adjusted Expectations: more in depth review process,
working with a profile that had not been significantly changed in many years
Unanticipated outcomes: the extent of changes Created new framework of multiple plans
Needed to coordinate profile changes among plans
Scope expanded to include additional needs discovered during the review process
YBP in Partnership Deconstructed the existing profile
Constructed several new profiles that mirror the collection development and access objectives of the library
Found a few limitations
Expanded to full use of the profiling capabilities of YBP
Found it necessary and beneficial to address each level of the profile
The subject review process
Review of certain publisher list rules
Review of series instructions
The process also served as a crash course for the library on YBP’s profiling capabilities and vocabulary
The Review Process Title by title review in GOBI
Viewed title notifications sent and titles shipped
Reviewed title detail in GOBI record
Kept running list of additional needs not met by main profile
Subject liaison as central decision maker Liaisons were in the hot seat but didn’t work alone
YBP role to explain profiling options and expected outcomes
Additional tools Excel : to view title information from GOBI in
aggregate
Classweb, Local catalog, Google Sites
Reflections It was a much more intensive process than most libraries
choose to employ
Worked well for LMU and the outcomes are informative for libraries in general It was beneficial for the library to consider the e-book policy and
print policy simultaneously
While academic output of e-books is somewhere above 40% of print and growing, there are still titles for which there is only a print option
Library needs a policy in place for collecting preferences for e and p
Library must decide between the multiple e-book options
A comprehensive collection development program can and, in this case, should include traditional print approval, e-preferred approval and DDA
The process was very beneficial for YBP as it provided opportunities to test out new approaches and new services
The Results We now have a profile structure that includes several
subject or function specific plans: A main books profile
An “essentials” profile to capture critical titles
A reference plan
A museum publications plan
A novels plan
Plans to support DDA
All of these plans are automatically de-duplicated but must be manually coordinated
Long-standing undesirable parameters were repaired
Found new opportunities to contemporize receipts based on new programs or other curricular developments
More Results So far in fiscal year 2014, we have we have received
fewer books on approval than in either 2011 or 2012
Factors to keep in mind as we begin to fully analyze the impact of our profile changes At the end of both the 2011 and 2012 fiscal years, the
library had to place our approval accounts on hold
YBP continued to allocate materials to our approval plans
When the new fiscal year began we received backlogged titles as well as current allocations
Some areas of our profile were restricted rather than opened
It will take several months for us to fully know the impact of our changes
Next Steps Incorporate reviews of subject areas into the subject
librarians’ performance goals on staggered intervals
Employ the use of online conferencing, video chat or remote desktop technologies to have dynamic and productive meetings with YBP
Establish a routine method for assessing the impact of the changes and ensuring quality control
Already created an assessment tool that asked the subject liaisons to self-identify their skills, abilities and knowledge of all of the concepts and tasks that underpin selection, evaluation, and collection management
Recently created a new DDA profile from the revised print profile
THANK YOU!
Charles Hillen – [email protected]
Glenn Johnson-Grau – [email protected]
Joan Thompson – [email protected]
Sources Nardini, B. (2011). Approval Plan and Patron
Selection: Two Infrastructures. In D.A. Swords (Ed.), Patron-Driven Acquisitions: History and Best Practices (23-44). Berlin: De Gruyter Saur.
Tyler, D.C. et al. (2012) Patron-Driven Acquisition and Circulation at an Academic Library: Interaction Effects and Circulation Performance of Print Books Acquired via Librarians’ Orders, Approval Plans, and Patrons’ Interlibrary Loan Requests. Collection Management, 38(1), 3-32. DOI:10.1080/01462679.2012.730494