Libraries and Freely Available Materials 2008 September 16
In a recent blog post, about IGeLU 2008, I mentioned a discussion about why you would include free e-books in your e-book discovery layer. This discussion got me thinking a little more about “acquiring” freely available e-resources. I have heard various librarians, in different ways, express that if they did not somehow purchase or otherwise actively select an item, it is somehow less valuable. I have no problem with the select portion, but I do have a problem with the idea that freely available stuff is, by its nature, less useful to include in your discovery layer. Yes, here are some low quality free e-resources, but in many cases the free content is as good, if not better, than stuff one has to purchase.
Identifying quality, freely available e-books and other e-resources might be an area that subject librarians can work in when the acquisition budget is spent, or drastically cut, for the year. This is also an area where groups of subject librarians from different institutions can effectively cooperate to identify quality e-books to include in each other’s collections. I know that this already happens to some extent with Web resources (for example, within WESS), but this could be expanded more and could focus on books, open access journals, and articles/book chapters held within scholarly repositories.
I don’t know of any specific tool designed to facilitate this kind of collaboration. Sending e-mails or editing a wiki might not be good enough. We would need an easy way for librarians to identify resources (maybe using a browser toolbar or widget) that will store these items in a centralized place, and allow libraries to extract the items in there subject areas for bulk inclusion into an ILS or other discovery layer. I am sure we already have some of the tools that can facilitate at least portions of this, but I don’t know if we have a way that allows for this to be done easily and quickly. Even if we did, we have an issue that not all of these resources have quality metadata associated with them. Who will create this metadata? While subject librarians are trained and have experience with identifying materials for their collections, often that are not trained or have experience with cataloging and/or creating metadata.
I’ll have to think about this more and possibly talk with some other librarians to see what we would need for this to work on a large scale, what is already there that can help, and how can the collaborative nature of this type of project could work. Oh yea, the other thing to ask is it really worthwhile? Maybe just taking everything in a particular collection of e-books is not a bad idea when compared with the cost and effort selecting individual titles. We typically already select a whole group of content put together by a vendor with journal databases were a vendor includes X number of titles. If we were choosing them one by one, I’m sure there are a lot of titles in these database bundles we have little or no use for. Maybe this approach will be sufficient with freely available e-books? But I still think the idea of cooperatively identifying free e-books is something that librarians need to explore more thoroughly.