Virginia ACRL Presentation

Clay Shirky, Fantasy Football, and the Future of Library Collections
Greg Raschke
North Carolina State University
Virginia ACRL
May 8, 2011

Assumptions
Economics are not sustainable
Collections budgets will not grow at rate of past 30 years
Unit growth and growth in cost per unit are not sustainable
Need to lower costs of overall system
Lower unit costs
Use data and users to be more precise
Tipping point for ability and expectations to deliver content at point of need
Therefore collection practices and strategies must change
This change will be hard – much reason for optimism

Supply-Side Collections
Print-based, unpredictable demand, and legitimate need for just in case collections
Lead to judging quality by size (as in the ARL rankings) and libraries were then held captive to this standard
Contributed to inelastic demand for journals and combinations of speculative buying
Use is secondary to size, dollars expended, and other input measures
Credit to David Lewis (http://ulib.iupui.edu/users/dlewis)

Supply-Side Can Not Continue

Demand-Driven Collections – Core Roles
Make information easily, widely, and cheaply available
Collections as drivers of research, teaching, and learning
To make special or unique collections held/managed by the library available to the user community and the world

Demand-Driven – More Assumptions
Less tolerance for and less investment in lower use general collections
Resource management based increasingly on use
Modify collecting based on changes in the actual use
Embrace expansion of available content and sense-making role
Risks of not evolving and failing to innovate – newspapers

Demand-Driven – Assertions
Tension between time-honored role as custodians of scholarship versus enabling digital environment for scholars
Must work on:
Lowering unit costs of scholarly materials OR
Lowering number of publishable units
Must free funds for investing in “new” arenas such as digital curation, PDA, and devices

Demand-Driven – Assertions
Rewards of adapting – more used and vital than ever
Use based and user driven collecting models will take growing share of budget
Bet on numbers
Bet on good and quick
Put resources into enabling digital environment for scholars and custodian role will come out of that strategy

Demand-Driven – Changing Practice
Not just PDA – portfolio of approaches - more responsive and expansive
Utilize new tools and techniques to become advanced analysts and deliver content at point of need
Truly embrace evidence-based decision making and ability to deliver content on demand

Reducing Unit Costs – Data Analysis
Collections work less about selection and more about analyzing use and incorporating content w/technology
Data analysis is a key component in solving/managing:
Increasing pressure for accountability
Increasing capability to gather and analyze data
Increasing precision in the way we build collections and expend resources
Advocacy
Changing practice and data analysis at NCSU

Serials Review 2009 – Open, Data-Driven, and Real-Time Analysis
Standardized usage data (where available)
Bibliometrics - publication data and citation patterns (e.g LJUR)
Impact factor and eigenfactor
User community feedback via interactive, database-driven applications
Weigh/calculate/quantify user feedback
Weigh price against multiple data points
Usage ((07 usage+08 usage/2)+(publications*10)+ (citations*5)+(Impact Factor)
Community Feedback ((Weighted Ranking x % Match) x Total # Rankings) + 0.1 x # of "1s“
Price/feedback value
Price/use
Merge results to filter out top 20% and bottom 20%

Looking closer – Finding balance
An example - a closer look at print item usage
Traditional ILS reporting tools can make this difficult
Advanced analytical tools can help
What types of questions can we ask?
Should Patron-Driven records not purchased be purged after 2 years?
How does print item usage break down?
Do print items even get used?

If it’s not used after 2 years…
Should PDA records be purged?
Maybe…
We haven’t even hit 50% usage
But what if we take a longer view…

If it’s not used after 2 years…
Things begin to look different

Looking even closer…
How does print item use break down?
Single circ usage is consistently ~14%
Would this change in a PDA only world?

Expenditures to University Data

Measurable Uses of the Collection 2009/2010 Measurable Uses of the Collection 2009/2010 Full-text journal downloads* 3,672,600 Database use 1,989,972 Print book circulations/renewals 525,430 Digital collections requests 471,403 E-books 149,815 Reserves** 327,267 Total Uses 7,136,487 * Includes use of NC LIVE full-text content ** Includes textbook, print, and e-reserves usage

Demand-Driven - Content at Point of Need
Expansive view of available content
PDA
Scope, invest, trigger points, and integrate
Integrated electronic profiling and selection
Packages of online content – affordability (?)
Short-term loans
Changing ILL and article delivery
To users in the mode they want to consume content
Move money into new areas – less speculative buying and more to demand-driven

Collaborative Imperative
Digital curation
Digital collections
Mega-consortia and collective bargaining
Sense-making

Challenges
Have ability to be more precise, more used, and more relevant than ever – need to make the necessary changes
CAVE people
Data and user-driven approaches can punish niche areas, disciplinary variation, and resources without data

Challenges, cont.
Contradiction of personal apps/devices and open resources
Apps are a risk – silo(ing) networked, web environment
Open resources impact ability to control and command discovery environments, content delivery, and data analysis

Virginia ACRL Presentation

by Greg Raschke

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