In April Library Support Services and Liaison Librarians reviewed our EBL e-book short term loan purchases during March 2013. On the whole we were reasonably happy with what was being used but we wanted to identify purchases we thought were irrelevant, what we considered to be suitable for short-term loans and what were suitable for outright purchase. One of the imperatives for this review is that we have an immediate need to significantly reduce the size of our patron-driven discovery profile with EBL in regard to non-owned content (opex). If we were to continue at the current rate of spending, the e-book loan book budget (opex) would run out well before the end of the year. The changes agreed were to reduce the EBL profile as follows:

– Excluding content already well-represented in the print – History, Language, Literature, Linguistics, Mathematics, Religion
– Shortening the preserve time of titles previously used from 12 months to 6 months
– Limiting the publication date to 2011 and onwards
– Excluding publishers which duplicated e-book content available elsewhere (e.g. CRC Press)
– Excluding publishers which appeared to be profiling “lightweight” material

The effect of these changes will be to reduce the number of EBL patron-driven discovery records in our catalogue from approximately 80,000 records to 30,000 records. We are working on these changes with EBL now and hope to have this completed before next week. If it turns out we have made a mistake and inadvertently removed particular titles in demand (e.g. being used for assignments or courses now) we can put individual titles back into the profile if needed. Hopefully we have bought these titles (for outright purchase – capex) already.

Tim Stedman