Krafty Librarian

Recently I have been writing a series of posts on ebooks.  The blog posts didn’t start out as a series.  It all started from an update post about our video from the MLA webinar where I added a few things that we wanted to say on the video but didn’t due to time constraints and where I answered a few questions from the #mlaebooks Twitter discussion.  Then I followed it up with another post on ebooks for small libraries because I realized I accidentally missed a question from the Twitter discussion and it was easier to blog the answer than to write a really long comment.  By then my brain was thinking ebooks and the next two posts Ebooks: The Library Catalog and Federated Searching Part 1  and Ebooks: The Library Catalog and Federated Searching Part 2  looked at some of the things I think we (librarians) need to help manage our ebooks and make them more findable for patrons.

It seems the MLA webinar has definitely inspired some discussion about ebooks, because I am starting to notice a little more chatter regarding promoting ebook usage among library patrons. 

Promoting is very important and I think there is no one size fits all method to promote your library’s ebook collection.  Some librarians report their patrons respond well to emailed alerts, others report their patrons get so much email that anything sent to a large group is often deleted.  Some librarians have good results with brown bag lunch and learns, while others can’t get anybody to attend even if they fed them. Promotion methods vary and all I can say is that we should all be sharing our ideas, what worked, what didn’t, and possible reasons for success or failure.  The larger the idea pool, the more ideas others can draw upon. 

Usage statistics are a key way to determine whether your promotion efforts are working and people are using your ebooks.  I have a few things to say about ebook usage statistics that librarians just entering the ebook fray should think about.

Don’t compare your ebook usage stats with your ejournal usage stats.  We are familiar with ejournals and we use their usage statistics to help guide our collection development decisions.  So naturally we would do the same with books and in a way it is hard (maybe I just find it hard) to not look at the overall ebook usage and compare it to overall ejournal usage.  That is like comparing apples to oranges.  They may be fruit but they are not the same.  Ejournals publish new articles weekly, monthly or quarterly.  Ebooks do not have nearly that type of publishing pattern.  Most books are published every few years.  Traditional books that have new updates added to the ebook version are updated as frequently but not usually as often as ejournal gets new articles.  Content is constantly changing within an ejournal.  New information is added many many times through out the year.  This is not the same with ebooks.  For example, you have people who subscribe to the TOC of journals to see if there is an article they may want.  I don’t know of the same type of interest in the TOC’s for ebooks. 

So not only does the constantly changing content in ejournals drive more people to their sites, but it is a lot easier to find journal articles than it is to find book chapters.  Let’s face it MEDLINE is way more robust at finding information on a topic than LocatorPlus.  That is because MEDLINE has articles that are indexed individually.  Unfortunatley there is no MEDLINE for books.  The best we can do is have the TOC for books.  While that is helpful, that is not giving books and book chapters the same methods of findability as journal articles have. 

Those two things alone are most likely going to drive your ejournal usage higher than that of your ebooks. 

Personally I would look at your ebooks by title and begin to break down how much your ebook costs you per download or chapter view.  If you have a ebook that costs you $500 for a single user license and it was accessed five times that year, it cost you $100 per use.  The goal is to get the cost per use down as low as possible.  It is up to you determine what appropriate cost per use is.  If it is an ebook that you happen to have in print then look at your circulation statistics. Look how often the book was checked out and compare it to an ebook’s cost per use .  This may prove to be helpful.  If it is reference book, look at how often you are reshelving the book instead of circ stats. 

The usage of ebook packages are little more difficult to evaluate.  For example MDConsult has multiple books and you really can’t cherry pick among the books.  If you can get usage statistics per title that is great.  But instead of being frustrated about the books that don’t get usage in that package look at the ones that get the most usage.  Their usuage has to be better than if they were available ala carte because they are carrying the cost of the under utilized books.  Not every book in your package is going to be a home run.  The key is making sure that you have more books in your package carrying the usage burden than those that are in the package but may be out of scope for your institution. 

The last thing to remember, acceptance, adoption, and usage of ebooks will take time.  It took time with ejournals, but I think we sometimes tend to forget that.  We assume our users are already savvy to online literature because they are using ejournals, ebooks are different.  They may be literature but they are different and it takes time for people and things to become common place.

After participating and watching the MLA ebooks webinar two things became very apparent to me. 

1. Patrons do not use the catalog
2. We need a federated ebook search system

If I tried to address both of these issues it would be a very long post, so today I will discuss the catalog and tomorrow I will discuss federated searching.

Patrons do not use the catalog:

We aren’t the only library to notice this problem.  When most of your library’s information content is in the catalog and when patrons aren’t using the catalog, they aren’t finding the information.  I blame librarians and ILS companies. 

Why do I blame librarians?  We are on the front lines, we should be seeing how our patrons are searching (or aren’t searching) and adjust accordingly.  Yet we really don’t completely do that.  If we did then we wouldn’t be cataloging in MeSH!  I like MeSH, I really do, I think it is the best way for me to search for literature in database like Medline.  But really only librarians are the ones who speak MeSH.  The general population does not.  MeSH is the Esperanto of the medical library where only a select few of learned individuals know and use the language yet the vast majority of the population doesn’t. 

Honestly, I only really use MeSH when I search literature databases which contain millions of articles on various subjects.  When it comes to searching the catalog I usually search using keywords, like most of the library patrons.  So why are we even bothering adding MeSH terms to the catalog itself?  Most of my keywords (and I am a librarian) and certainly most of the patron keywords aren’t MeSH, they are at best general subject terms. 

Earlier this week Julie Stielstra posted on Medlib-l a question about alternative cataloging systems.  She described how a public library began to catalog their nonfiction differently by using “plain language” subject headings with author lables.  For example: SPORTS BASEBALL Bouton or COOKING FRENCH Child.  She wondered if her patrons wouldn’t be better served if she cataloged items like this as well.  Her example was NURSING PEDIATRIC Wong  2010 and I kind of agree with her that it is much more intuitive than WY 159 W559e 2010.

Perhaps we need to really investigate why we insist on using MeSH when clearly our patrons don’t want to use it.  Teaching them to use MeSH for Medline searches is at best a challenge, getting them to use MeSH to search a library catalog is sisyphean. 

For those who are ready to strip me of my librarian stripes, you can still have your MeSH cake and eat it too.  Go ahead keep the MeSH in the record but start adding some general terms that make sense to patrons.  I would love to say, let the patrons add the terms, but that won’t fix the problem.  Patrons don’t use our catalog, and by doing that we would be relying on the few that do search it to take it upon themselves to do the tagging of the collection.  Librarians should start tagging the collection themselves so that there is at least a skeleton set of terms for people to work with and build upon.  Giving them a blank canvas and telling them to paint a master piece is not fair to them.  We have to get them started with paint by numbers first.

Why do I blame ILS companies? 

Because librarians can only do so much.  Most of medical librarians are not programmers nor have the time to create a robost ILS that is required these days.  Therefore we need ILS companies to do that.  However, ILS companies are still designing systems with librarians as their primary users not the patrons.  The librarians are not the primary users.  We are the primary users of the back end but not the system. It seems ILS companies don’t know how to design a system that marries the back end necessities to a patron centered front end.

Patrons want an Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble like system, and quite franklyI have not seen an ILS out there that provides that experience.  Some systems are trying to do better, for example Innovative Interfaces just released a news statment about their AirPAC product for smartphones and its use in libraries.  Those kind of enhancements are helpful but the over all experience of ILS products is still pretty dismal.

Here are examples of different libraries or library system’s catalog records for Hurst’s the Heart.  (Names of libraries have been removed.)

1. Example 1 from a group of small hospital libraries.
2. Example 2 from an academic medical library.
3. Example 3 from an large library system.

Which one is better for the patron? 

Example 1 is just a mess of words with no break for the eye and a bunch of gobblty gook that the patron doesn’t care about.  The call number is in the upper left hand corner like a card from a card catalog.  In fact the whole record is pretty much organized like a card from a card catalog.  Get rid of this design/organizational and display method.  Most patrons these days have never used a card catalog so they don’t “get it.”  Hell we have librarians now who never used a card catalog. It is just more of a mess for them to look at and they have to hunt for pertinent information.

Example 2 is better visually but is still kind of a jumble of words (especially in the TOC). Other things that are odd to a patron, do you really need that many words to describe format and does that all make sense to a patron?  Notes does not mean the same thing to patrons as it does librarians, do we need to show that?  I don’t know, I was always told in library school that people like to know if it has an index, bibliographic references, or illustrations but I have rarely had patrons ask me this when I am looking for a book for them.  They want to know if we have it and if so where can they find it.

Example 3 is the best of the bunch, but it too could use some improvement.  I love the picture of the book in the right, that is helpful to see.  (I realize the other examples were to the online book and may not have had images, but why can’t they if they are the online version of a printed book?)  The two biggest things that the patron cares about, does  my library have this and how do I get it are up top just below the title information.  I am not a big fan of adding links to Google Books if the book isn’t free or available through there.  I think “Limited Preview at Google Books” is not helpful to the patron (How limited? One time only? Can I print? Just the first chapter or TOC? etc.)  This is a large consortia of libraries so the call number which is unique to each library is not listed at the top, but patrons can click on the link to the libraries that have it to see the call number.  (I’m not sure that this is intuitive but I am also not sure how else you would do that within a large group catalog.) Finally the TOCs are arranged in a readable manner with links to the authors of the chapters.  That is very helpful.  Only at the bottom of the screen is the librarian cataloging information, patrons are rarely interested in it and it should be that far down.

I realize that some of the examples not only reflect on the ILS but also the library or libraries that set up their catalogs, but do you see any that are as easy as Barnes and Nobel or Amazon.com?  If so I would love to take screen shots and list them here as good examples.  I would also like to know how their usage is and what those librarians report about patrons using the catalog.

This morning I was scrolling through the #mlaebooks Twitter feed to help fill in my notes from yesterday’s webinar and I ran across a tweet from LibrarianLizy asking for any advice I could give to small hospital libraries just getting started with ebooks.

I think Mark, Elizabeth, Meg, Karen, and Michael had some great ideas that can definitely be adapted to fit smaller libraries, but here are some of my thoughts which might or might now echo theirs.

The thing I think that is most important they mentioned is to know your users and their/your needs.  Are you a small nursing school library and do the test prep books get stollen or marked up?  Are you a small hospital library that serves people in many areas where a non-circ reference collection isn’t helpful/practical to users?  The type of library and the users needs will determine the “flavor” of your ebook collection.

In general in a small hospital library I would most likely start by looking at my current electronic resources.  Do you have MDConsult?  If so there are ebooks within there that you need to get people aware of and have them start using. 

Personally I think having as many access points to an ebook collection is good.  This is why I think an HTML list of your ebooks by title and general subject is helpful.  If you are a small library just starting out with an ebook collection, creating a list like this is totally doable (assuming you are authorized to create a library webpage) and isn’t too hard to manage.  If you have an online catalog, by all means add the URL to the ebook to the current record. 

*Note* I am not a cataloger so some of my ideas for adding things to the catalog don’t always jive with current cataloging practices. 

If you have a book in print and electronically, I tend to favor adding the URL to the print record in the catalog.  Most of our users want one record, they get confused as to why Hurst’s the Heart is showing up multiple times, especially if dates are similar.  They will often just click on the record that is displayed first and that is it. 

(Here is where I get into some cataloging heresy) If you have the print version of a book and the electronic version is a newer edition, I still think it might be helpful to put the URL of the newr edition in record of the old print book.  I would put the link with wording that says something like, “Click here to connect to the full text of the newer edition online.”  I might add a second record for the newer electronic book edition, but again I really think our patrons don’t like seeing multiple listings for what they interpret as the same book. A lot depends on how you set it up and how your catalog displays things and how prominent the date of publication is on the results list and the bib record.

If you don’t have the print edition of an electronic book, then obviously I would add the record to electronic book in the catalog.

URLS in the catalog. Please make sure that the link the patron sees is clearly explained as the access point to the full text of the book online. This is an area that can be a total pet peeve of mine.

While the following phrases all mean something to librarians, how many patrons will see these phrases (or url) and easily know to use it to get to the online book? (All of these are from real catalogs, libraryname is a blinded name to keep offending libraries annonymous.)

• “Click here for MDConsult Online Book”
• “Link to resource at MD Consult”
• “Online”
• “libraryname Online”
• http://proxy.libraryname.edu/login?url=http://www.accessmedicine.com/
• “Click Here through R2Library”

No wonder patrons don’t know how to access our ebooks!  

While I am at it I will go into another one of my major pet peeves which is the location of the URL or hyperlink.  Listing the link to the full text of the ebook at the bottom of the record or mashed in the middle of the meaningless word junk of the record is not helpful to the patron!  The link to the full text should at the top of the record right below the actual title and author.  HELLO this is the is the most important information to the patron and some librarians and catalog systems bury it!  There is one specific ILS which is geared toward small medical libraries that despite having excellent customer service has the most abysmal catalog display.  Their display is more of a hinderance to users than a help and they are long overdue for a new catalog display look but have pushed it back multiple times over the years. 

Bottom line with linking. Be clear and put the link at the top of the record if your ILS allows it!

Usage statistics are also very important to libraries, including small hospital libraries.  Know how much an ebook is being used.  Mark made a very good point about the cost of ebooks and printed books.  Often an ebook is more expensive, but the cost per use is much cheaper than the printed book.  An ebook can be accessed and used by multiple people a day whereas once a printed book is checked out it is only being used by one person.  Your usage statistics will help you determine if an ebook or ebook package is worth keeping.

Finally start small and do your best promoting and displaying that collection.  It is a lot easier to manage and promote a smaller collection than start off the process with a large collection.  As more people buy into your ebook collection they will start looking and wanting more.