iNode

An interesting social media experiment is underway at Mason–each week a different member of the Mason community takes over the university’s official Twitter feed.  This week, Mark Sample had the honor and one of his tweets got me thinking about local numbers…

The report Mark cites can be found here.  Curious how Mason might compare, we ran a few SQL queries against our local catalog/circulation system.

The highlights:

If we limit ourselves to books that might have been expected to circulate (meaning we’re not counting reference books, e-books  or government documents), we found that since December 31, 1989, we have added 958,303 books to our collection.  Nearly one million real books placed on real shelves.

By library:

• 699,114   Fenwick
• 186,547   Johnson Center
• 42,080     Prince William Campus
• 30,505     Arlington Campus

285,799 or 29% of those 958,303 monographs have never circulated.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve never left the shelf or that they’ve never been used. Walk past a “reshelving” area in any of our libraries and you’ll see that many items are in fact used but inside the library.  And though it would be bad form to speculate in any detail, surely some small number of items by-pass the circulation desk altogether as they’re taken on a one-way trip out the door.  Nevertheless, the circulation numbers are surely an adequate proxy for usage.

One more bit of fine print:  We’re counting items added to our collection since 1990 which isn’t precisely the same thing as items published since 1990.  Doubt the difference affects the numbers much.  Every year purchasing an older imprint becomes more difficult thus the monographs we acquire in book form today were most probably published fairly recently.

So which is better?  A higher number (like the 55% at Cornell) or something lower (like Mason’s 29%)?

There’s much to be said for the lower number, particularly if it tracks along with at least a moderate-sized collection.   It suggests we’re good stewards of collection development funds but with a cushion that indicates we’re not just purchasing the fads of the moment (isn’t that a downstream problem with patron-driven acquisitions?).  Further, I think it shows we’re not paying huge utility costs or stealing collaboration space just so we can warehouse books that were last touched the day they we put them in the stacks.    Probably safe to say it also suggests we’re likely taking advantage of alternative formats (e-whatever) as we build our collections.

A higher number…well, if a library’s never-circulated percentage is high enough (and I’ve seen estimates as high as 80% for some)  you reach the researcher’s library nirvana: a collection so deep that even the most obscure request will likely be immediately satisfied. That is certainly a worthy aspirational goal for any library.

Coming up on our go-live date but I’ve been tracking the results of our stealth promotion activity. The graph below shows the number of Primo searches each day–still quite small but over the past 30 days we’re averaging 543 daily searches (and that includes a few really down days over Thanksgiving).  For the thirty days prior to that (Oct 6 – Nov 6) the daily average was 406 so I guess that means we’re making slow but steady progress…

Based on usage, here are the ten most popular e-books in our Safari Online Books collection for 2011.  Each title includes [number of accesses during the year].   In total, an e-book was pulled from our virtual shelves 356,563 times last year.   The top 10:

• Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design [26,372]
• Internet & World Wide Web: How to Program (4th edition) [20,417]
• Effective Java: 2nd edition [15,853]
• Computer Security: Art and Science [8165]
• Joomla! 1.5:  A User’s Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website, 2nd Edition [6,914]
• Test Driven: Practical TDD and Acceptance TDD for Java Developers [4,131]
• Head First Servlets and JSP, 2nd edition [4,061]
• Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML [3,791]
• Head First Design Patterns [3,465]
• OCA Oracle Database 11g: Administration: Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-052) [2,713]

And the least popular e-book? Hard to say.  We had 1,054 titles that saw only one virtual access during the year and 2,983 that just gathered cosmic dust.  5,097 (roughly 63%) of the titles in this particular e-book collection had at least one access.

I was listening to the latest Digital Campus podcast on my way home yesterday when the discussion began to hit close to home…

Talking about a day in the maybe not-so-distant future when most books are available in one e-form or another:

Dan Cohen: “I wonder what will happen to libraries of the size we have here at Mason, you know, the one to two million volumes, pretty much recent collection (the past 100 years), doesn’t have a deep catalog of rare books? What happens in a world of all digital book content to that kind of library?

I still get the Library of Congress or Harvard or the University of Michigan, but it’s hard to give a rationale for why a library like Fenwick here at Mason sticks around. It’s a lot of heating, a lot of physical plant…and it’s a lot of people. And I love libraries, but aside from that fact, the sort of Upstairs/Downstairs ‘Well this is where the poor people go to get their sad, old printed books’ …you know, what happens to it? Even now it’s not a place where people start their research…”

Dan, I’ve been asking myself some form of that question for at least ten years.

While I surely have a salary-driven bias, I’ve always assumed there will still be something we’ll call a library when the e-future arrives. But I sometimes wonder–will it have evolved from today’s library or have been created as a replacement for it?  Thinking about how we get from here to there, I worry:

• Will we, as a profession, spend too much energy chasing improvement in the transactional metrics of success (items circulated, reference questions asked, gatecount, etc.)? Once tried-and-true measures of library utility, they’re in irrevocable and ever-accelerating decline. Shouldn’t we accept that and begin redeploying resources in pursuit of new opportunities?
• Will we recognize and be able to exploit transformational moments as they appear? Or will we pass on them as “not something libraries traditionally do?” Put another way, how far is it from “heart of the university” to “vestigial organ?”

Today one ‘mid-major’ library has roughly the same collection as the next one on the list.  That sameness, combined with the trend toward outsourcing what were once considered core enterprise-level services  (e.g., campus email systems moving to a vendor-supplied cloud), seems a dangerous mix for the library. Let me share my own “worst case” scenario:

The world has gotten past the friction that limits universal satisfaction with today’s e-readers and e-content and into that environment, a large ‘web-scale‘ vendor appears…offering the university a subscription that provides e-access to all e-content along with a strategically-priced bundle of e-reference services.

Think it can’t happen? The ears of that cat are already peeking out of the bag. Consider a product like Summon. The ProQuest business model for Summon is surely based on two facts:

• the leased (or licensed if you prefer) e-content of each library is roughly the same
• it actually resides on the servers of vendors outside the library

Why not engage in a bit of corporate cooperation and then sell access to a cloud-based index of that content over and over to each and every one of those libraries?  To the degree that you can vertically integrate content leases with the search mechanism–well, that’s what they call “lock-in” gravy.

So, back to Dan’s question. What does ‘the library’ do for a second act? I’m guessing:

• Our footprint (buildings and staff) will be much, much smaller
• We’ll offer very fast and ubiquitous networking on site and focus on high-end equipment/tools for manipulating and reworking digital content
• We’ll offer on-demand services like “find and print” or “find and import” so users can build their own libraries
• We’ll develop special tools and services to aggregate e-content in locally relevant ways (a 21st century analog to the old “finding aid”)
• We’ll put much more emphasis on supporting teaching and learning
• We’ll focus as much energy on data-driven research as we do today on the bibliographic-driven counterpart
• We’ll offer more service and financial support for the front-end of the scholarly communication process (e.g., paying fees for campus authors in OA journals, helping authors secure their rights and protect the value of their intellectual investment, etc.)
• We’ll still be doing the “special collections and archives” thing as that will be a large part of what differentiates libraries

We’ll surely still find that students are starting their research elseweb…

Speaking of librarianship and technology (as happens here from time to time), I want to highlight a couple of signs from the rally down on the Mall this past weekend. Here’s a frame from some video I shot:

Thanks to a tweet from Dorothea, I now know the inspiration for that one…

Years of wacky vt100 emulation have given me an appreciation for my other favorite (sorry, don’t have a photo of it but this pretty much captures the idea):