Issue 6: Status Check 2005: An Examination of the Trends and Influential Factors Contributing to Subscription Renewal and Cancellation
Interview Stephen Haas of the University of Massachusetts, Boston's Healey Library
Emilie Delquie Global Teleresearcher and Research AnalystStephen Haas has been the Collection Development Librarian for the past 2 years at the University of Massachusetts, Boston Healey Library. As the department has evolved over the years, he now oversees all aspects of the Acquisitions Department as well. Before that, he worked in the Reference Department for 10 years where he was heavily involved in Collection Development.
ED: Let me start by asking some questions about the UMass system as a whole: have you been benefiting from a lot of consortium deals and do you rely a lot on those consortium deals when you plan your future acquisitions?
SH: The University system is Amherst, Dartmouth, Worcester and Lowell and Boston. It's only 5 universities and vendors don’t seem to feel that’s sufficient to give us any great deals. We do much better when we go through the Boston Library Consortium or Nelinet or NERL because there are many institutions involved so there we get better discounts. We probably get the good majority of our databases through consortia. We get some directly from the publisher but I would say the majority is through the consortia.
ED: At this point, do you even consider a vendor that comes to you independently?
SH: If I’m considering a database, I’ll look at the vendors’ price and I would also see if it’s available through one of the consortia that we deal with. If it is, I’ll talk to the vendor and if the vendor is willing to give us the consortium price, which some vendors are, without having to go through the consortium then, we’ll usually go through the vendor.
ED: Now, just in terms of Umass-Boston: what evolution have you seen over the last 5 years? How would you describe the impact of the electronic availability of journals?
SH: It’s been a great change because it’s all about virtual library now: electronic resources are what our constituency wants and it’s our primary interest. If we can get something electronically and the cost differential is not tremendous between electronic and print then we go electronic. What it’s meant in terms of journals is that we have a policy that for most journals, we will not get them both electronically and in print. So in the last 5 years, it’s meant that we’ve cut our print subscriptions substantially and we’ve increased our electronic access substantially for journals. For books, the impact hasn’t been great as yet. It’s only in the last year that we’ve started to get into e-books. We had a few (a couple of hundred titles) that we got through the Boston Library Consortium several years ago, but it’s in the past year when we got 2 aggregated databases. So at this point, we’re starting to move into e-books more and monographs more. For several years, we have been getting into electronic reference books and pretty much our policy now is that if an encyclopedia or another kind of reference set of books is available both in print and electronically and the cost differential is reasonable, we will get the electronic-only. We will certainly continue to move in that direction, but what we would like to do is more e-book monographs.
ED: Have your end-users gotten used to it? Do they now ask for e-book?
SH: We haven’t done any surveys, and we should. We really don’t have time at this point, but I can tell you that the usage statistics are good on the 2 databases we have. So evidently they are being used and I would guess that the printing and other related problems don’t seem to be a big deal. Studies have shown that most people who read the e-books do not read the entire book from front to back. They’re consulting specific chapters; they’re looking up specific bits of information and in that sense, they function almost like reference books. So I think there is a real need for them. I don’t think many of our clientele want to sit down and read War and Peace on an e-book, but for the kind of Social Science and Science books that they use for their research, I think there will be a growing demand for it.
ED: What was the impact on your collection from the Open Access movement? Do you catalog these titles?
SH: We do catalog them; we just haven’t had the staff to really explore Open Access in any depth. It is something we would like to do but it but at this point we just don’t have the staff. I would think that in the future though, Open Access development is something that we’ll watch because it is a growing trend. How Open Access plays out, we’re not sure yet.
ED: So you’re not canceling anything if it is available online through Open Access somewhere?
SH: At this point, we’re not for a variety of reasons. One of them is again the shortage of staff. But another is that I would be weary of canceling things so quickly because you don’t know how long something is going to be available for on Open Access.
ED: In terms of your journals acquisitions and cancellations: do you have preset policies? Who makes decisions on what needs to be added or cancelled?
SH: For databases, I make the ultimate decision on canceling a database as the Collection Development Librarian. What I do is I try to get as much input as possible from the electronic resources librarian and the head of reference. In fact last week, we were looking at the possibility of canceling somewhere between $80K and $100K in databases this year and drew up a proposed list and gave it to the head of reference and the electronic resource librarian who went over it. We discussed the list together and came up with a consensus for the final proposed list. As far as adding databases, the electronic resource librarian or the head of reference will come to me with suggestions to trial a database and then will tell me what they think after the trial is over and I’ll make the ultimate decision. But I try, particularly since I’m no longer in Reference and they have their pulse more than I do on what people are looking for, I try to make it as much a consensus a decision as possible.
ED: What do you think about those trials?
SH: I think in general the trials give us access to enough features. Some of them are long enough but others are only for a month or two and it would be nice to maybe be able to set up something for three months. The only drawback on that is that once you put trial out for that long, people begin to get accustomed to it and then if you pull it, people get upset. On the other hand, just trial for a month, I don’t know if it’s sufficient time to really judge the impact of the database.
ED: Is there any recommendation you would make to publishers?
SH: The one thing that would be nice, but I think is not possible to do because vendors are negotiating contracts with different publishers is that it is annoying when a journal is on a aggregated database and then all of a sudden, it is not. But the database producers I’m sure don’t have much control over that and they must pull a journal for a variety of reasons: either they get a better offer from another database vendor or they feel they’re being too cannibalized in terms of subscriptions for the journal by being in an aggregator, so I don’t think that the database producer has much control, but it would be nice to have a constant and reliable access to our journals.
ED: Thank you very much for your time.