Issue 8: Spring 2007
Interview with Lorraine Busby – University of Western Ontario Library
Emilie Delquie Head of Research and Research AnalystLorraine explains how their library’s commitment to online resources has impacted their strategy over the last few years. Lorraine also provides some insight into the role of consortia in Canada, the future she foresees for eBooks and Open Access. Finally, she emphasizes the importance of a strong relationship between publishers, libraries and their intermediaries in order to optimize the content access.
Background
Emilie Delquie: Could you give me some background information about your institution and your involvement in the library?
Lorraine Busby: The University of Western Ontario is one of Canada’s older institutions. We’ve been around since 1878. Because of that, we’re fairly well-established. We consider ourselves to be the fourth largest academic library in Canada and we have a wide range of disciplines: a medical school, engineering, law, all the arts, humanities, social sciences and a good range of sciences as well. So we are considered a multipurpose academic institution.
I am the Associate University Librarian, Information Resources and as such, I have overall responsibility for the library’s acquisitions budget. In my role, I propose distribution of our resources for purchasing new library materials and in conjunction with the Library Executive Committee; we distribute funds to the different libraries and subject areas for specific selections by our subject specialists. I also have signing authority for licensing electronic resources and authorizing large purchase items. So I am heavily involved with the processes for acquiring electronic and digital information.
As with most Canadian academic institutions, we are heavily involved in consortia: OCUL, the Ontario Council of University Libraries, is our provincial consortium and one we rely upon heavily. When it makes sense, we do consortial activities at the national level. When we are working at the national level, we are also trying to tap into potential government funding, which requires matching levels at the provincial and institutional levels, but it allows us to obtain buying power that we would not be able to reach otherwise. Canada is a relatively small country people-wise and the only way we can get a critical mass of participation is if we cooperate both regionally and nationally. So Canadians are heavily involved in consortial activities.
Users’ behavior
ED: With the increase of online content availability, how have your library users adjusted to the changes and does Google have any impact on user’s research?
LB: We are finding that students are digital natives so they have absolutely no problem embracing electronic resources. It is more a matter of ensuring that students have access to appropriate digital content. We do find that there is some reluctance by the students to use other resources because they are so familiar with the electronic ones. So they show some hesitation about actually making use of print resources.
Faculty members are more discriminating. They tend to focus more on the content and its applicable value to their particular research and their teaching interests. Increasingly, they are all considering digital resources because they are finding that the electronic format facilitates identifying the information that they want even though they may need the print material to ultimately work with. But there is less and less resistance to electronic information.
Our users in the STM areas highly embrace electronic as the preferred format. Users in the social sciences and humanities are, in selective areas, still a little resistant. It is depending upon how they are working with the material but increasingly, they are moving forward on it.
On the Google front, I’m not working with the students myself so I do not have direct feedback from them. What I am hearing from colleagues who are working with the students is that our staff have accepted that’s the way students are going to be approaching research. We see evidence in reports from other librarians and institutions that students don’t normally start with library resources. So we simply accept the fact and then try to work with them and deal with the information literacy issues: how to distinguish whether the resources are good are students considering their information options?
We try to do a lot of information literacy classes with the students on the basis of subject disciplines. We work with our faculty members to see how it makes sense to embed library support into their courses. In some cases, faculty members, will allow class time so that a subject specialist can go in and give a presentation on how to facilitate their research. In other cases, we have a component embedded into an electronic class or assignment through WebCT.
ED: Have you observed a clear decrease in usage for print material and as a result have you changed the way you were selecting new resources?
LB: Six or seven years ago, we made the decision to move towards going electronic only whenever possible. Now this was predominantly on the journals end of things so we aimed to have 75 to 80% of our journals accessed electronically within 5 years. As of a year ago, we achieved it: we were at 75% electronic in some fashion. Some items were electronic plus print if that was the only way that we could get the electronic version. We are continuing to give up print journals whenever possible and relying on the electronic only. For most subject disciplines, it meets our users’ needs and they are happy with it. We need to do it for efficiencies and for access for users.
The original Canadian National Site Licensing Project, which was implemented as an innovative approach to provide critical sci-tech information electronically, was premised on the basis that we would not deal with print resources. It was to be electronic resources only for the country and that would be a condition upon which government funding was provided to trial something different. The goal was also to try and create a more level playing field for STM information available across the country so that regardless of the size of an institution, our faculty members and their students could have access to the best information on an equal basis.
ED: Are you observing the same shift to online for books and major reference works as well?
LB: Books are a little bit different. We certainly acquired consortially a select group of - initial entries into the market (NetLibrary for example). We continue to monitor the use and the access, but there really wasn’t a critical mass of content available. We found over the last 12 months or so that all publishers are starting to become more heavily involved with electronic books. The challenge now is that the access pricing models and implementation processes are not consistent with the different options that are out there so we are still just testing things out. But we haven’t aggressively embraced it in the fashion that we did with journals for a couple of reasons: many of the first publishers to jump into the market with electronic books are in the STM field and yet STM critical literature is primarily available in journals. So STM monographs, regardless of whether digital or in print, are not needed for fast access. Yet, in the humanities and social sciences where monographs are the critical publication format, there are fewer offerings available. In some cases our users need the actual print item in hand. What we’re finding is that the STM books are not necessarily our first priority, so we are continuing to selectively acquire and to monitor how our users are using the material and trying to get a handle on what’s happening in the industry so that when we begin to see a clear direction, we’ll be better informed to more aggressively to acquire the digital content.
ED: Have you found a model for eBooks that works particularly well for your needs?
LB: As with most libraries, we want to buy content once, but with the electronic access, we need to have as many of our users accessing this content as is needed in the institution. It can’t be quite the same as with print books where it would be one person at one time. That just makes no sense in the digital world. So we are looking for ways to determine a fair price for the content with multiple users when books are used differently. Some of the highly specialized books in the research function will not be used heavily. We know that from the print version. Half a dozen uses would be considered very good. Yet how do you offset that with something where there may be a chapter in the book that needs to be used for a course reserve? I think everybody is anxious to move ahead with - electronic books; the challenge is finding a mechanism that works for all parties.
Purchasing Decisions
ED: In terms of online access to journals, do you have a preferred source: the publisher’s website, databases, other? And do you have policies against embargoed content?
LB: Absolutely. When Ontario participated in the Canadian National Site Licensing Project, we also took the opportunity to use matching institutional and provincial funding to acquire our own server. As we negotiate with content owners, we negotiate to locally load their content on our server so it becomes in essence a mirror site for the publishers. But it also puts all of our content at a single site where our users can access it and it becomes one-stop shopping. The issue of local loading is important when we are working with our vendors. We have a preference for working with content owners, which means publishers and not aggregators, because we need the permission to locally load the content and to have it accessible there for the long term and to be stable. That is our strategic direction. Even when we worked with the Canadian National Site Licensing Project, which is now the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, it was understood that any content we acquire at the national level, would be locally loaded on our provincial server whenever possible.
With embargoes, the real question becomes how is the user using the content? When students need a mass of material with sufficient variety and depth to respond to their assignments then embargoed content in not an issue. But if your resources are there to support graduate and faculty research, then it becomes critical that you have the current content. Embargoed packages and aggregators packages simply don’t meet your needs. We’re heavily involved in rolling out our graduate programs and our research functions so we more heavily rely on working with content owners. Because of the nature of our subject areas being across all disciplines, we go for publisher package deals. We have commitments to the Big Deal with many publishers and that becomes our key content. We’re less involved with aggregators, although we do have some to support our undergraduate programs.
ED: PCG has consistently found that faculty recommendations or endorsement have a very significant impact on the collections of university libraries. How does the situation in the US compare with this in Canada?
LB: The subject specialists liaise with the faculty to get their input and we do find that it is critical. Because of our strategic direction to acquire package deals from publishers, we have a large proportion of the major academic peer-reviewed journals. We have all the big names journal publishers, so we determine with our faculty members how to flush out the breadth and depth of the collection to further support their needs. We respond by purchasing single one-off titles. As we start to see that we’re acquiring significant content form one publisher then we start exploring whether it makes sense to go to a package deal with that publisher. We’re certainly interested in faculty recommendations but what we’re finding is that as a result of embracing package deals, we do not have the same number of requests coming through. We already have most of the content that’s needed.
In our context, we have not had a lot of journal cancellations since 1999. This has largely been because the Canadian dollar has strengthened against the American dollar. We purchase probably 90 to 95% of our material in foreign currencies because the resources we need are actually not produced in Canada. So we’re very conscious about what’s happening with purchasing power and currencies. As a result of the American dollar not being as strong, we have increased purchasing power, which has protected our journal budget.
ED: You were recently at an Acquisitions Conference in the UK; did you also hear similar comments overseas in regards to the American dollar?
LB: It was interesting to see there that British librarians were shocked at the size of Canadian budgets. Whereas in Canada, we are always feeling like we are buying at a discount compared to American libraries. Even though our dollar has strengthened, we’re still taking a hit of least 10 - 15% on the purchasing power. The only good news is that it is better than the worst-case scenario of 30- 35% loss of our purchasing power during the 1990s. In England, some of the large universities there have many small libraries that need to be staffed and stocked. In Canada, our universities have fewer, larger libraries. On a campus, we may have half a dozen libraries where we achieve more economy of scale. One UK institution reported that they have over 100 libraries; they had to be very small libraries but you just can’t get the same efficiencies in staffing and resource purchasing if you’ve got that many physical locations.
Open Access
ED: What is your view on the Open Access movement? Have you cancelled any journals based on the fact they were moving to Open Access?
LB: Open Access will meet some of our needs in some subject disciplines, but I don’t think Open Access is going to be a one-size fits all. I’ve been following some of the discussions on the liblicense listserv and I think publishers do have some valid issues about efficiencies, validation of the information and the existing structures that has been in place for decades. Open Access will make in-roads in some areas but there will continue to be a need for commercial publishers to be producing some of the academic information in other areas.
We have cancelled some print titles that are available through Open Access, but it was more due to the fact that we are moving toward electronic access and not wanting the print to come in. It’s not so much the fact that it was Open Access. We do not want our staff tied up with receiving physical issues, checking them in, shelving them, binding them… and if our users are simply going to use the electronic access then what’s the purpose of the additional staff time?
One impact of Open Access that does match with our strategic direction to go electronic is that there are many new-to-us journals in DOAJ; we chose to catalog every single item there regardless of whether or not we had the print subscription because we wanted to facilitate the access to our users.
Publishers
ED: What are the key issues that you would like to see addressed by publishers and content vendors working with your organization?
LB: One of the biggest issues is that there are never enough financial resources so we all have to be conscious of efficiencies and there are a number of different ways in which we can work collaboratively with each other. I would very much like to see publishers embrace the SERU initiative. Handling individual licenses, product by product, package by package, is not achieving desirable outcomes. We need to find ways of getting past that and I think that the SERU initiative has great potential to work for both of us.
Along with that, publishers have to be aware of the value of agents and intermediaries. When electronic formats became readily available, I think some publishers saw the opportunity to cut out these intermediaries. It has been quite evident that publishers truly do not understand libraries as customers. They are working harder to speak with us and I think that the very fact that your organization is interviewing librarians is an example of that. But as it stands, the intermediaries have a far better and an in-depth understanding of what our issues are and what our overall business is. So we have to have ways to work together.
There are still major challenges of working with Society publishers. Societies are structured to meet the needs of their members and unfortunately, libraries follow as a distant second-class customer. Libraries can be very powerful at facilitating access to their content, yet we are treated as not equal to a single member. We understand that but societies end up putting in place policies, procedures, processes which are cumbersome to libraries and which do not work well on the large scale so if we can find some way to achieve all the outcomes by working together better, it will be of great benefit to all of us.
The last message is that we all have to be conscious of facilitating access. If the user communities out there do not access the publishers’ content then all of us are out of business: publishers, intermediaries and libraries. I believe we all have a role to play. We need to be working to ensure that material is being used and is accessible and that’s where we can come together.
ED: Do you feel the publishers can and should help you increase the usage of your resources?
LB: Usage starts with accessibility. If we can get better information and easier activation there will be greater usage; if you order title by title, every publisher has a slightly different process or pricing mechanism. Pricing mechanisms based on size of the institution are not consistent at the international level. For example, some publishers try to use the Carnegie scale, which does not map over outside the US. Everyone attempts to respond with a best guess. I have heard that serials agents track up to a 100 different pricing models in their efforts to facilitate activation of access. The process is still cumbersome which creates unnecessary costs. Publishers need to be thinking less proprietary and more standardization. They see that as a potential risk to both their revenue stream and their future. Yet, if they don’t see themselves as being mainstream, they will be marginalized.