Waugh, M.,
Donlin, M., & Braunstein, S. (2015, Jan 14). Next-generation collection
management: a case study of quality control and weeding e-books in an academic
library. Collection Management, 40(1),
17-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2014.965864
This paper presents a case study in e-book weeding from
Louisiana State University. E-book collection management policies do not exist
in over 95% of ARL (Association of Research Libraries) facilities and it is
unlikely numbers would be much lower in any library. E-book collections need to
be evaluated according to a thoughtfully created policy in order to keep an up
to date, useful collection to serve patrons needs. By examining the
difficulties and triumphs experienced by other libraries, staff can work to
address deficiencies in their facilities.
A major problem will be interacting with vendors since they control
collections. It will be important for individual libraries demand better
self-service, so that change can resonate for all libraries to become a default
standard.
Summary:
Weeding is defined as “an essential step in library
collection management”. There are many recommended procedures to help
librarians with this process, but e-book collections have been easier to disregard
as they do not take up physical space. In addition, most libraries have spent
the last few years just creating and building their collections, so it’s harder
to get into the mindset of paring a new collection.
It is critical for libraries to think about establishing
some practical guidelines for weeding e-book collections and can begin a policy
by looking to the print collection policy. Some items can be addressed in both
collections like currency, usage, and subject coverage. The biggest obstacle
for libraries is the lack of self-service weeding access for libraries. Most
libraries utilize vendor products and so require mediation to update a
collection, which is time consuming. Regardless of difficulty, it needs to be
considered. It is particularly important for items related to health sciences
to be current as outdated information can be dangerous. Also, catalog search
results can be cluttered with unhelpful or outdated material, making it harder
for library patrons to effectively search.
Louisiana State University did not address their e-book
collection by passing them through a collection development procedure or during
a 5-year weeding project. When the university adopted a new web discovery
service from EBSCO, some oddities in that collection were noted. LSU had purchased
an all or nothing collection from a now redundant organization about 10 years
ago as part of their vendor’s site. The items were all added to the catalog in
groups of hundreds and thousands with little oversight and no adherence to the
purchasing standards set by the print collection. The EBSCO service has full
text indexing which helped to bring the deficiencies of the collection to
light. Keyword repetition was increasing the relevancy of the texts and pushing
them to the tops of search results, resulting in a lot of spam.
Staff later found out that many of these titles were
books “written” by computer algorithms, followed a template, and summarized
information found on government sponsored websites. Examining text side by side
reveals the with the exception of topic keywords, the texts are nearly
identical, with the same verbiage and cited resources. The URLs cited were no longer active or
verifiable. Many of the texts were also related to the medical field and LSU
does not have any sort of medical program. In order to get the texts off of the
catalog list, the librarians had to contact EBSCO for a workaround in which
they created an exclude list populated by the titles they no longer wanted to appear.
They worked off of IBSN numbers, so while some could be easily grouped for
addition to the list, it was an entirely time consuming, manual process.
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