Academic Libraries: 45% of ebrary Customers Diversify E-book Acquisition Models for the Highest Return on Investment

From an ebrary Announcement:

ebrary today announced that 45% of its customers are diversifying acquisition models to provide their researchers with a breadth and depth of high-quality, relevant e-books. Many customers subscribe to Academic Complete as an affordable base collection with unlimited access and continued growth and expand the collection with other models including patron driven acquisition, perpetual archive, and short-term loans. Academic Complete is the industry’s first and most scholarly subscription product with over 75,000 titles.
[Clip]
“While we have been investing more of our budget in e-books, there is no way that we could meet all of our students’ needs by purchasing every title outright,” said Rebecca Schroeder, Acquisitions Librarian, Brigham Young University. “By subscribing to Academic Complete, we can offer a vast base collection and leverage usage statistics to determine which titles to purchase. We have also streamlined our patron driven acquisition program, firm orders, and epreferred approval plan through YBP to more efficiently build our ebrary collection. This approach enables BYU to affordably get a wide selection of the right e-books into the hands of our students.”
“We initiated our e-book acquisition strategy by purchasing individual titles through YBP but needed to offer a wider selection so we subscribed to Academic Complete,” said
Lynda Fuller Clendenning, Head, Acquisitions Division, Indiana University, Bloomington Libraries. “We also are in the midst of an ebrary patron driven acquisition pilot through YBP where we are offering all of our profiled approval slips. With this three track approach we hope to learn about our users’ uptake of e-books and how we might adjust our acquisition strategy to further build our collection.”

Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Libraries, Publishing