Issue 7: Spring/Summer 2006
Interview with Abigail Bordeaux of Binghamton University Libraries
Emilie Delquie Global Teleresearcher and Research AnalystAbigail Bordeaux was, until recently, the Electronic Resources Librarian and handled most aspects of electronic resources management at the Binghamton University Libraries, including licensing, ordering, trials, e-journal and database activation and access, and technical support. Recently, Ms. Bordeaux became the Web Services Librarian. She coordinates and/or manages various projects related to their web services and maintain tools such as their OpenURL resolver and metasearch tool. She also does collection development for Binghamton's Russian and East European Studies program. She has been working in libraries for 11 years, first as an undergraduate student in acquisitions, then in special collections and cataloging before coming to Binghamton in 2000.
Emilie Delquié (ED): In your Against the Grain article , you write about your patrons and you explain how the electronic availability of all these journals can be quite tricky for them and how it can actually become more of a labyrinth than anything else, so in your opinion how have your patrons adjusted to the changes in electronic availability?
Abigail Bordeaux (AD): It’s important to say that although my article focused on some of the negatives about electronic access, it is clearly a huge benefit for everyone: for the patrons, for me as a librarian doing my own research… I think we have really come to rely on electronic availability, and I think everybody loves it despite the problems that it does entail. One thing that we have noticed is that as more and more serials become available online, people expect everything to be online and are less likely to use material if it is only in print. Even when my article appeared in Against the Grain: I don’t have a personal subscription to Against the Grain, but our library has one, so I was waiting for it to come out. Our periodicals section for current issues is up on the second floor and it took me about three weeks to actually get out of my office and walk upstairs to see the article because it wasn’t online. I think that is an example where I acted as a patron and had a similar reaction: if it is not online, maybe I will get around to looking at it but maybe not.
ED: Have you really observed a shift to Google to research articles before your patrons check the library online catalog?
AB: I don’t do reference so I don’t have first hand experience hearing students or faculty say that, but I have heard it from a number of colleagues. I recently started doing collection development for our small Russian and Eastern European Studies program and met all the faculty in the program. When I mentioned that concept they all started nodding their heads. So it does seem to be the case; it resonates with the faculty members that I work with.
ED: Have you made any changes to your website to try to accommodate your patrons?
AB: Yes, absolutely. We implemented a metasearch tool last August and one of the things that was very important to us was the ability to put a search box for that tool right on our library home page. We would love it if our patrons knew how to navigate all the databases we offer and how to find a specific journal easily, but really what they want is that search box right up on the front page, if they get to our site at all. So we wanted to have a box there where they can type in keywords as they would do if they were using Google, and not have to know the name of a particular database, or where they should go to start a search. Here is something quick that they can use, and judging by the statistics that has been very popular.
ED: Do you keep track of the path your patrons take to access articles and have you observed a preferred path, method to access information or website?
AB: We keep web statistics, we use software to count the number of hits and to look at the paths that people take, but we have not reviewed those reports recently due to technical issues. In fact, I am not sure we have looked since we implemented the metasearch tool. There were some problems with the paths that people were using before we implemented the tool that we were hoping to solve but we have not been able to evaluate that yet.
ED: Regarding your journal collection, does your institution have specific guidelines for cancelling unique serials? What are the factors that influence journal cancellation decisions?
AB: We do have guidelines. We did a cancellation project in 2003 and we looked at a variety of factors at that time. We would re-evaluate which factors to use if we had to do a new cancellation project and such a project would definitely be a last resort. We would look and see how well it worked or if we need to make changes. We tried to look at a wide variety of factors: we looked at faculty requests certainly, input on the area of their research, the usage data, and cost per use. We looked at availability through aggregators, but that is not considered very much because we don’t consider it to be a reliable replacement for a subscription. We look at it for titles that are perhaps very marginal. For a title that we could do without if it were dropped by the aggregator, we might use that aggregator as substitute, but aggregator access would be very low on the list of factors.
ED: So online access via a journal aggregator does not necessarily constitute a substitute? Would you find it more reliable through a publisher’s website? What really constitutes good online access for you?
AB: Certainly the titles where we are paying for a subscription: really the only guarantee for the access is if we are paying for a subscription ourselves. In that sense, a publisher’s website would certainly be a better place to go than an aggregator. Because with the aggregator, we are not paying for a specific title, we are paying for whatever they happen to include.
ED: Is the decision still made on a case-by-case basis?
AB: Yes. I should add: you and I are talking mainly about journals but we also have a whole different set of factors that we look at for databases subscriptions. We have been working a lot on that this past year because we have never done a large cancellation project that included our databases. The last serials review focused on our journals. So we have been fortunate that we have not had to do that to date, but we want to be prepared and have the data to look at our databases subscriptions should that be necessary. We have a grid that we started this year, looking at factors such as technical reliability, ease of use, and how the interface is, as well as some of the things I already mentioned like cost per use and importance to faculty.
ED: In a recent study conducted by PCG, 80% of the librarians contacted stated that they had cancelled some print subscriptions when the content was available electronically. In your opinion, what constitute acceptable online access to drop a print subscription? Do you consider that an online subscription can sometimes duplicate a print subscription?
AB: We have been trying to move our subscriptions from print or print + online to online-only when it is appropriate as much as possible, taking into account things like the quality of images and the completeness of the online availability. We generally don’t cancel our subscriptions for aggregators, that would not be in most cases an acceptable substitute. But in terms of moving our subscriptions from print to online, we are trying to eliminate duplication as much as possible. If we are paying a percentage on top of the cost of the print in order to also have online access, those titles would be primary candidates to look and see if we can move the subscription to online-only since we are paying for two different formats. We are definitely trying to eliminate this type of duplication.
ED: Regarding archiving, how concerned are you about archiving (both perpetual access and back issues) and what steps do you take to ensure that your access to the journal will remain after a possible cancellation?
AB: It is important. When we consider moving a subscription to an online-only subscription, we do look at the license. The primary thing that would be of importance to us would be to make sure that we will have perpetual access to the content that we paid for. Whether that is in an online format or some kind of offline format: we have not gotten too picky. I don’t think any of us would like to go back to having to load CD-ROMs locally, but we have not yet used that as a basis for excluding a title to move to online-only. It is a growing concern as we move more content online, it would become more unwieldy if we should ever have to make that content available locally. We will have to start giving that more consideration the more titles that we move. As far as things like archiving should the publisher go out of business, it is something that we are concerned about, but it is not a basis for excluding a possible move to online-only. I was just at NASIG, the North American Serials Interest Group, last month, and there were a couple of handouts given to all the registrants: one of them was about the Portico initiative and the other was for Controlled LOCKSS. I brought those home with me and I still have them right out on my desk to remind me that it is an area we need to look at and I think that locally we need to be educating ourselves about more.
ED: You mentioned earlier that faculty recommendations were key to your renewal decisions, to what extent do you collaborate with them when considering new acquisitions? Do you think online trials for individual journals or larger packages help in your process?
AB: The collaboration varies from department to department. There are some departments that want to be heavily involved in collection development and frequently give recommendations to the librarian in their subject area. There are some departments that are a little more hands-off. But overall, faculty requests have a huge impact on the new journals that we acquire. With a couple of exceptions, we are purchasing mainly at the individual title level. For the most part we are not looking at packages, primarily for cost consideration. And because we do value that deliberate selection and the idea that we are choosing the titles that are the most appropriate for our institution. If we were a larger university, we might be more interested in some of the packages but because we are medium size: we have about 14,000 students, we are not as comprehensive as some other institutions.
ED: And do you find those trials to be helpful in your decisions?
AB: Yes, absolutely. Most of the trials we do are for databases rather than journals. In the Fall, there was a publisher that offered access to all their journal content for a certain period of time and we got a lot of feedback from faculty members during that trial period requesting that we consider subscribing to as much of that content as possible. It was a publisher that was really in demand and we have a number of their titles, but there are a number of other titles that we have not been able to pick up for financial reasons. We heard loud and clear from our faculty that they were really interested in that content. We have not been able to subscribe to a lot of it, but at least we know very clearly that our faculty are interested in it.
ED: What constitutes the ideal trial for you in terms of length, amount of content, ease of access by password, or IP address?
AB: Thirty days is a reasonable time. With anything less than that, it can be difficult to get faculty input and for them to have the time to check out what is available on trial. Certainly, IP filtering is much preferable to user name and password. When we have a trial that is username and password, we put the trial out on our website, but since the page is publicly available, we obviously don’t put the username and password. We have to put two names of people they can contact to get the username and password in the library. And then we hope that that covers it if somebody is out, but it is much easier if we can do IP filtering.
ED: Do you have any other comments about print or online journal subscriptions?
AB: One trend that I have noticed that makes a lot of sense from a publisher’s perspective, but is very difficult for libraries: the packaging of backfiles and selling them separately. I can certainly understand from a publisher’s point of view why that would be something they would want to do. It is very difficult when we had a subscription for several years that had included a certain number of backfile years and then all of a sudden that is taken away and made into a separate subscription. We at this point have not bought many of those and so it is really difficult to explain to faculty: now for these years, you actually have to come back to the library and look up this title. So that is an issue that we are really grappling with and it is going to be something that we look at more and more because people expect that content to be online. But it is hard to pony up for the backfile when you already have paid for the print subscriptions and they are theoretically available to your faculty but perhaps in a practical sense not as usual.
ED: And the faculty expects you to have everything online now?
AB: They do, although it varies some by department. They do and even in cases where the backfiles have been separate for a while, sometimes it is on a moving wall basis. They come in and say why, it is January and the semester is starting, “in December, I was able to get x, y or z issue and now I can’t”, so there is a lot of PR that needs to be done.
ED: Now, regarding Open Access, what is your view about the Open Access movement? How often do you use OA journals and how important are they for your institution?
AB: I have not followed the Open Access movement so closely in the last couple of years. In part because of the nature of my job, which is changing to focus more on IT and web development, so I left it to some of my colleagues, particularly in our Science library. I know that they are doing a lot to educate our faculty and students about OA and in the larger sense, the conversation going on about pricing models, sustainability of current journal pricing. It seems like things have quieted down a bit in the industry, just in terms of the conversations. I don’t see this rush of journals going to an OA model the way I did a couple of years ago.
But again maybe that is a function of what I am focused on. Even if that rush is past, and many journals are not adopting that model, I think it is opening up the conversation and it has been very important in doing that. Our model up to this point has been to include titles listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. We activate those titles. We use a third party ejournal management tool where we can turn on the listing for the DOAJ in a blanket sense. We have done that and so anything that they list in the DOAJ for their service ends up in our ejournals list. So we do point people to all these titles. We try to catalog them as much as possible, but because we have so many other things to catalog and so much other work to do they are a lower priority unless a subject librarian requests a particular title. There is coverage in our catalog but I am not sure that we have kept up 100% as they have added new titles. But we do try to include them and to let people know that they are out there.
ED: In a study conducted by PCG, librarians reported that the availability of OA journals do not influence their collection decisions at 57% of the institutions. Do OA journals have any bearing on journal collection or cancellation decisions at your institution?
AB: I would say up to this point, no, they have not. When we did our last cancellation project, it was in 2003 and certainly there were Open Access journals available but at that time, they weren’t titles that probably would have impacted our decisions.
ED: And in the future, do you foresee considering the Open Access journals more?
AB: I think it could happen on a case-by-case basis. I don’t think I would be the best person to answer that.
ED: Finally, what are the key issues that you would like to see addressed by publishers and content vendors working with your organization?
AB: One of the big issues that we are facing right now and I am sure it is not uncommon at all. As we try to move more content online, particularly reference works rather than journals, we are struggling with moving from a model where we buy a reference book, we pay for it one time and we put it on our shelves. Moving from that to a model where we are using the same content that is hosted on a remote server and therefore, even if the bulk of the purchase is one time in nature, there is an ongoing commitment that we need to make financially. It makes sense that there would be some kind of maintenance fee if the title is hosted remotely. Our budgets have not caught up and we are really struggling with how to make that transition financially. So, that is something where I hope we could have brainstorming and conversations with publishers and with vendors and make sure that they are aware of the issue and how to move to a model that is sustainable for both librarians and publishers. It is just a huge issue for us right now. We are pretty aggressively looking at online packages and individual reference titles that we can put online instead of the print. We have been running into this wall of trying to come up with the money for ongoing charges. Right now the money is allocated to the book funds, where we spend it once and it is done. It has been really tricky to try to accommodate people’s desire to have things online and accommodate the space limitations that we have. I don’t see any easy way out, but I do think it is something we all need to be thinking about.
ED: Do you have a suggestion for a model that would work well for you?
AB: We have looked at packages with titles that would have been a one-time purchase. More commonly, there is either a subscription cost that is the same every year or a bulk cost upfront and then a small maintenance fee. I would say that we are much more likely to buy packages or titles when there an upfront cost and a relatively small maintenance fee, than we are to buy when it is the same price every single year. So if publishers are considering pricing models for reference titles in particular, it is much easier for us to swallow if it is a smaller fee on an ongoing basis.
ED: Thank you very much for your time.