What We Learned from the (e)Book Snapshot Project

Collections Analyst
,
OhioLINK
Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - 12:20pm

OhioLINK has a great history of shared collections within our consortium of 120 Ohio academic libraries and the State Library of Ohio. And, like the rest of the academic library world, we are in the throes of the print-to-electronic book transition.

Back when all we had were print books, students and faculty requested books from another library and they were delivered in a truck. However, we can’t share eBooks the same way. Even though OhioLINK has sets of eBooks available to users at all member libraries through its Electronic Book Center (EBC), individual libraries still need to purchase eBooks specific to their own local academic needs. But as libraries start to acquire eBooks locally, we’re losing that collaborative share-ability factor we had with print.

So we have this really big question: What can we do to continue to meet the needs of our students and faculty through this print-to-electronic transition? More specifically, are there patterns or trends we can pick out to ease that transition and guide our path forward?

Recently, at the Electronic Resources and Libraries conference, I presented a case study in which we took a close look at print and eBook use among our member libraries. We hear anecdotal information about certain users preferring print or eBooks, and we did this in order to see what actually emerged from the usage data.

We are able to compare electronic usage and print requests for similar content because OhioLINK manages a central catalog that includes our shareable print and electronic resources. That means a student looking for a book could find either an eBook to view immediately from one of the OhioLINK eBook packages through the EBC, or a print book from a member library they could request for delivery.

Because we could be talking about tens of thousands of eBooks and millions of print books, we decided to narrow the question down to an initial case study. So we took the angle of, what did our students and faculty use in just one year? We chose 2014 and to limit our scope to one publisher, Oxford University Press books. We went with Oxford books because a lot of our member libraries buy them, and we have had an Oxford Scholarship Online eBook package in place through the EBC for several years. So there are a lot of Oxford print and eBooks a user could find.

In principle compiling this data seems simple: Get electronic usage reports, print request reports, and match them up with the list of eBooks in the package. However, we were still dealing with data on the scale of over 100 libraries, thousands of books, and hundreds-of-thousands of transactions. Moreover, much of this was text data that had to be cleaned up before it was useful. So I turned to a few tools I had been eager to work with: OpenRefine for filtering and cleaning up data and Tableau for analysis. Once we had these together, we were really able to dig into the data and look at print vs. electronic activity, do some subject analysis and look at use by institution.

So what did we find? Well, we started with this really big question that, of course, we weren’t going to comprehensively answer in a small case study. But this case study did show us a few things. For one, it suggests that what we hear anecdotally is true; there seem to be certain subject areas in which print is preferred over electronic books, and there are instances in which the reverse is true.

In addition, we saw that students and faculty at OhioLINK member libraries still use both print and electronic books even when they have a choice of format, so we can’t just assume that everyone wants an eBook.

Even more than that, we now know this kind of analysis is practical given the data and the tools we have at hand. In the future, we could look at other publishers and other years to see which trends persist. We could look into factors we didn’t account for, like enrollment or course offerings, or usage activity at the local level. So the truth is, this case study is just the beginning.