Tuesday, June 18, 2013

assigning subjects to e-resources (not just serials) in pursuit of a library's collection profile

In pursuit of exposing inequities in library monies invested to date in the different subject areas of our collections, it seems to me any work on serials/electronic serials, mentioned in my previous post, may be augmented by work we've already done with other e-resources.

Think about all those subject webpages at our respective higher education institutions. Many of us have already listed the most important, or categorized all of our electronic databases (and other e-resources?) into subject assignments on these subject based webpages. So recording all e-resources in an excel spreadsheet, [excluding serials/e-serials(?) and books/e-books(?)], and recording what e-resources belong to which subject pages already tells us something about where our monies have gone.

And it has already been broken down by subject expert librarians. Neat.

It will also tell us what e-resources are not being used/promoted as valuable by the subject experts on those subject webpages. I'm not sure if this may be the equivalent of also telling us where purchasing/subscribing went awry, for those librarians with little control over what gets purchased/subscribed regardless of your subject expertise recommendations. I suspect this is where investigating your usage statistics will come in handy. Pairing usage stats, FTE and Head Count with the categorized e-resources my be very enlightening on a number of fronts.

We will also find out what e-resources have broader use/promotion than other e-resources (also requiring a pairing with stats for the best picture results) based on their presence on multiple subject webpages. Where before we purchased/subscribed (and may still) to broad, encompassing databases for the best one-search capacity for undergraduates, it may be that our mix of "most commonly referenced on subject webpages" combined with where the stats reflect best usage, will cause us to rethink how we provide services/resources. Or not.

I'm still mulling this over even as I create these profiles of e-resources on our subject webpages. I'll try let you know how it goes.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Looking for %'s for online vs print serials by subject...

II'm slowly working my way through statistics around our subject funds here at the univ. As budgets are decimated by the big serials deals (disproportionate amount of monies spent on online serials, or even ebooks, most of which are perceived to be STM) our duties to our users, among them specifically leveraging our purchasing power in an equitable way on behalf of our community of users, have become compromised by the political will of our administrators and the big deal. I'm looking for evidence/data that the humanities and social sciences are being gypped, since they are allegedly still heavily print-based. But I'm in search of granular data.

I know I can go through our big deal packages and try and assign titles per subject and percentages per package for each big deal, and then assign for our small packages and one-off titles, but has anyone else done this work? Has anyone done so in pursuit of a different agenda but would be willing to share? Further, has anyone actually done a % breakdown of print vs print+online vs online only by subject such as LC classification? 

I'd like to take pre-existing or and/or newly created data and use it as evidence to force a more equitable distribution of funds, be that based on FTE, Head Count, etc., a breakdown that would respect publishing practices per subject.

Is there anyone out there with this data or knows where it may be found? (and no, I haven't started reviewing LIS databases as yet). And is anyone interested in working on such a research project with me?