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HammerOvGrendel t1_jdfv79t wrote

It's actually my job to sit and crunch the circulation numbers all day. I work at an academic library that has almost no physical holdings left other than art/design books. What I'm generally doing is providing data that goes to the budget planners to inform the decision to either renew or cancel a journal subscription, and to take that data into the negotiations with vendors. Key metrics are cost-per-use, use-by-faculty, use by subject area, year on year trends, failed access attempts and so on. Before this, my last gig was working for a vendor doing much the same thing but with a sales support focus.

The advantages of Ebooks for us are that they don't take up any physical space, they don't get lost or damaged and we can control the loan settings to prevent circulation "logjams" on popular titles. By this I mean that I can set individual titles to only by available for short term loans, or to only be "checked out" as long as you have it open in a browser. I can set the system to automatically buy a second copy if someone tries to access a book that's already checked out, and to send me daily/weekly/monthly reports on access failures.

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Isatis_tinctoria OP t1_jdhcxwy wrote

That's kind of sad that the academic library does not have physical books. Why doesn't it have physical books? Is it just a matter of budget?

This is a fascinating insight into what you do with those numbers.

So, if we check out more books, the libraries have the data to show that there is a need and desire for such books, then you can take those numbers and request even more money?

Edit: What happens to books that are barely checked out but could be useful for research - such as academic books? In other words, perhaps Harry Potter is checked out constantly. But if there are niche subjects of academic topics. They could be useful to maybe one person a semester. Will those books survive?

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HammerOvGrendel t1_jdhoi7y wrote

Well, there are a few things to unpack from your comments. Australian academic libraries have had an E-preferred collection development focus for a long time now, and several of the companies working on the technology to make that happen were Aussie start-ups in the early 2000s. So it's been a big part of the ecosystem for a long time now. Our Universities are pretty much all publicly funded, and we do a lot in the distance-education space - my University does the whole "open university" online education thing, we deliver remote Vocational courses throughout Australia, and we have partner campuses in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. It's not at all like the American "college experience" of living on campus and living that whole lifestyle. In fact in many other countries we would be called an advanced research polytechnic instead.

Our collection policy follows from that - there's no point keeping outdated concrete engineering standards documentation on the shelf, or having user guides to Windows 95 taking up space.

"So, if we check out more books, the libraries have the data to show that there is a need and desire for such books, then you can take those numbers and request even more money?"

There isn't a "more money" tap that you can switch on sadly, or rather those discussions happen at the Dean and Vice-Chancellor level, far far above my pay grade. We get an allocated chunk of money for the year, then we have to try and guess what the foreign exchange rate will be at the end of the year, and then have to negotiate with the vendors about their price rises.

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