Collections and budgets: libraries and publishers and collaboration

Roxanne Missingham, University Librarian

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Genesis

"Universities are here to make the world a better place: as their direct purpose, not a by product” Prof Stephen Parker

Vital role of collections

3Kautto-Koivula and Huhtaniemi

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Perceptions of the roles of the academic library

• Ithaka S+R

• Tenopir

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Ithaka study. Key findings (1)• The largest shares of respondents cite the library’s role as a purchaser of

resources as very important. Larger shares of humanists than academics from other disciplines identify each of the library’s functions as very important, especially it’s service-oriented roles.

• Though less than one-fifth of academics surveyed indicate that they think that their students have strong research skills, there exists little consensus regarding whose primary responsibility it should be to develop these skills.

• When searching for academic literature, academics favour their library’s website, scholarly databases or publicly available search engines over the library building.

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Key findings (2)• Respondents report that they value established scholarly dissemination

methods, prioritize publishing for audiences in their sub-discipline and discipline, and select journals in which to publish based on characteristics such as topical coverage, readership, and impact factor.

• Academics from the social sciences, medical sciences and natural and physical sciences have begun to embrace digital research methods while humanists feel that new practices might not be relevant or valuable to the types of research that they conduct.

• Regarding data curation, academics tend to work with research datasets or collections of media on their own computers, and think they could best be supported through access to commercial software or institutional repositories.

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Research practices

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Tenopir studies (ANU)

• Increasingly library focused –– One third of respondents (32.7%, 18 of 55) do not

have a personal subscription– Average number of personal subscriptions is 2

(M=2.45, SD=2.91)– Print is the predominant form for personal

subscriptions.• Academic staff who published 5-10 items

in the last two years read the most books and other publications

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Libraries – roles within the academy

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• Most article and book readings are for research and writing; other publications are read more for current awareness and research.

• ANU academic staff members on average spend 133 hours per year with library-provided material, equivalent to 16.6 eight-hour days annually

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• Australian National University postgraduate students, on average, spend 254 hours per year of their work time with library-provided material, or the equivalent of 31.75 eight-hour days annually

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Ithaka studies of Group of 8 libraries

• Survey in 2014/5• Go8

– Melbourne – New South Wales – Queensland – Sydney – Western Australia

19http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3478739

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Digital natives

http://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2014/05/24/cartoons-on-digital-natives-and-immigrants/

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Reviewing collections

• Review value• Factors include:

– Relevance to research and teaching– Cost and use – Cost per use– Competitor products– Degree of uniqueness– Workflow costs – cataloguing, processing

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• Text books vs scholarly monographs

• Open access – Knowledge unlatched and the demand for

new models– Open access text books have been found to

produce better student retention, higher marks and greater literacy

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http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1108

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• Comments/questions