Summer conference round-up
A trio of major summer library conferences kicked off with the Canadian Libraries Association Annual Meeting in St John’s, Newfoundland, which was followed-up a week later by the Special Libraries Association annual show in Denver, Colorado. Boasting an opening address from US Vice-President Al Gore, the SLA conference hosted a wide variety of speakers and session topics for discussion.
However, the summer calendar’s focus was really centred on the annual American Libraries Association meeting, held this year, in Washington, DC. With a record attendance of over 28,000, librarians from North America and vendors from around the globe descended on the US capital for the annual meet.
Pay-Per-View versus Subscriptions - Saving a library thousands
Ingenta’s Library Services Director, Claire Winthrop, spoke on a panel during ALA, discussing methods of document delivery in an increasingly demanding market, where current purchasing strategies often represent inefficient use of available resources. Claire was joined on the panel by Trinity University (San Antonio, TX) librarians Clint Chamberlain and Barbara MacAlpine, who have recently conducted some research into cancelling subscribed titles and fulfilling user requests for the cancelled content through document delivery.
Trinity University is just one of many libraries to feel the pinch of subscription costs, with an average 8% increase in serials prices in 2006 unable to be met by their 2% budget increase. In an effort to reduce expenditure and improve efficiency and access to articles, Trinity’s librarians embarked on a study to cancel selected subscription titles and offer access to these titles through the pay-per-view method of document delivery, via the use of deposit accounts.
The trial focused on Trinity’s access to Elsevier titles, which consumed 19% of Trinity’s budget despite representing only 4% of the library’s collection. With careful monitoring of departmental access, requirements and budgets, their current subscriptions were cancelled to make way for a single deposit account, with individual logins for each faculty member. Usage and account statuses were then tracked for each department and invoiced monthly allowing tighter control of budgets and spending.
The University was presented with compelling findings to support the just-in-time method of purchasing. During the six-month trial, the library not only experienced significant financial savings; faculty staff were also delighted at the availability of a wider variety of content and felt a significant benefit to having access to previously unsubscribed titles.
Whilst the University experienced some teething problems with users familiarizing themselves with implementation of the pay-per-view system, it has experienced a saving of $3000 to date, which continues to grow through this new method of purchasing.
Claire Winthrop contributed an overview to the session which was able to draw on Ingenta’s unique experience serving both libraries and publishers. She noted that publishers’ resistance to offering pay-per-view on their content is diminishing, which means that more experiments such as that carried out by Trinity will be possible ongoing. She talked about some of the ways in which vendors such as Ingenta can help to smooth a transition from “just-in-case” subscription purchasing to “just-in-time” document delivery, for example, by offering both mediated deposit account purchasing (which requires an authorised administrator to make the purchase, for example on behalf of undergraduate students) and unmediated purchasing (which allows trusted users such as faculty members to purchase articles themselves). Comprehensive reporting, and the ability to separate users into different cost-centres with different spend limits, was also considered to be valuable functionality for a deposit account.
For further information on IngentaConnect’s pay-per-view packages and deposit accounts, please contact, libraryinfo@ingenta.com.