On December 26, 2015, Izzy Stern tweeted: “Today is the day I found out that Rutgers doesn’t even have full ebrary access. So many sad faces.” As a graduate student in a major humanities department at Rutgers–New Brunswick, Izzy might have expected to use ebrary, one of the largest academic e-book resources, for her research in the winter break, but then had a rude awakening that day when she found out that it was not available at Rutgers, yet. So she went online and shared her frustration on Twitter with the entire world, which was totally understandable. As a matter of fact, the lack of access to e-books was a major source of complaint from our students and faculty about the library collections—hundreds of similar comments can be found in the results of the LibQual+ and previous Counting Opinions surveys. Here, I quoted only Izzy’s tweet because it is on the open web, but the problem she reported was a common one.
What a difference a few months have made! Izzy and her fellow students may be glad to hear that the Libraries have made great strides to improve their access to e-books. Here are the major e-book resources that became available at Rutgers in the last several months:
- Ebrary Academic Complete: a subscription-based collection of about 140 thousand e-books on all academic subjects.
- Springer Nature frontlist e-book collections: 7,175 purchased e-books published in 2016 in STM (Science, Technology, and Medicine) and Social Sciences.
- PALCI/EBSCO Demand-Driven Acquisitions Program: about 1,000 new e-books expected to be purchased during the academic year.
In addition, we are evaluating a new PALCI/JSTOR e-book program. The program will purchase several hundred high-use titles and also provide academic year-round access to all the JSTOR e-books, a collection of over 40,000 high quality scholarly monographs from many of the major university presses.
Over a decade ago, the Libraries began to acquire small, subject-based e-book collections. In 2014 we joined HathiTrust, which gives us access to several million out-of-copyright works. However, the availability of large, comprehensive collections of current e-books today represents a quantum leap or a sea change. Since the Rutgers community is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the University this year with a revolutionary spirit, it may be befitting to call this significant change a revolution, an e-book revolution.
Stepping outside Rutgers, we will find that the e-book revolution is sweeping through the academic and research libraries in the region and the country. Actually, all of our major e-book acquisitions I mentioned earlier were made or will be made together with our partners in BTAA, PALCI, and VALE. This shows that Rutgers is adopting e-books at about the same pace as the majority of academic libraries. Being in the majority does not seem as glorious as playing the role of innovator or early adopter, but it is still an advantageous position, especially from a user perspective. Of course, if we moved any slower, we would have been left behind or characterized as reactionary by our peers.
Peer pressure is not why we are joining the e-book revolution. It is for the good of our own community. Within our organizational context, there are many reasons why the large-scale shift to e-books is happening now:
- The arrival of Krisellen as our University Librarian last year set a new direction for the Libraries.
- E-books provide convenient, equal, and equitable access to the entire Rutgers community, which happens to be a mandate under the University’s RCM budgeting model as well as a core value of librarianship.
- The loss of $1 million purchasing power in the collections budget in FY15, combined with the ongoing inflationary pressures, forces us to rethink our collection development priorities and strategies.
- When adopted by instructors as textbooks, e-books can generate substantial savings for students struggling with high textbook costs (see one reported example at Rutgers), which is important in the context of a large public university.
- The adoption of e-books can be part of the solution to our space shortage problem. As the Library Annex is full, our largest library locations are experiencing the stacks overflow problem at the same time that the universities want the Libraries to create more study space for a growing student population.
Relating to the last point, I distinctly remember a scene from the Library Town Hall meeting in the spring—a brave staff member stood up and asked everyone: “Since there is really no space in the Libraries, why do we keep buying print books?” Does this remind you of that fabled child who cried “The emperor has no clothes!” or what? I believe that print books are not obsolete and probably won’t be for a long time. There are also situations when only print is available. But we do have to be mindful of our space constraints when making book purchase decisions.
The e-book revolution is giving our community unprecedented access, but what it cannot do is bring a paradise to libraryland, not at Rutgers nor anywhere else. On the contrary, profound changes are always messy, chaotic, and uncomfortable and this one will be no exception. We have already started to face a new set of problems: how to make print available to the users who need it, in spite of our space and financial constraints; how to minimize the inevitable duplication between different e-book providers; and how to improve the discoverability of e-books, just to name a few. As we navigate these complex and difficult issues and find solutions, we will continuously improve our collections for the benefit of students like Izzy Stern.
