Following recent publisher price increases and discussions about access to patron-driven (short term loan) e-books, Library Support Services has made some changes to the profile we maintain through EBL. We have removed all titles published up until 2012 that have not been used in the past year. This amounts to just over 20,000 titles which has approximately halved the size of the profile. In addition to this, we have lifted the price cap for mediated short term loans from $US30 to $US40. We also previously autopurchased anything that had been loaned more than 7 times. This limit has been reduced to 5 loans and any decision to purchase outright will be mediated (to allow us the chance of considering other options including non-DRM e-book options instead of EBL). Library Support Services continues to monitor how well patron-driven e-book purchasing is working and welcomes comments at any stage. Tim Stedman.
This makes an appreciable improvement to the problem of EBL congestion of keyword searches in the catalogue.
Max
This development restores credibility to the ‘old’ catalogue – so long as we make it available for use (in addition to MultiSearch), it does need to give credible results for our users.
To illustrate the former problem, almost a month ago I did a catalogue keywords search (crisis communication) which gave 210 results. Half the results (105) were EBL patron-driven, and these were overly predominant in the first 10 pages or more of results (10 titles per page).
Exactly the same search now gives only 109 results, only 5 of which are EBL patron-driven, i.e. 100 less than previously.
So, great work Library Support Services!
Max
The problem we are experiencing at the moment (see my latest post) may well be giving a skewed result in relation to these experiences – Tim