Online users lead the way in electronic book trial

From late October 2007 until April this year, the Library was running a trial where control over purchasing of electronic books was placed in the hands of Monash students and staff.

A selection of approximately 50,000 electronic book titles deemed relevant to Monash teaching and research was loaded into the library catalogue. These were then available for library users to access online.

Whether a title was subsequently purchased was based on the number of times a title was used. That is, all titles could be browsed for up to 5 minutes without a use (or loan) being registered. If the client opted to continue reading online after the first five minutes, a “loan” was registered. Once the title was “loaned” three times, and if the electronic book was not already held by the Library, the title was automatically purchased.

This model gives staff and students immediate access to a large collection of multi-disciplinary material that would not otherwise have been readily available. Over the period of the trial, 14,000 titles were accessed of which 1,600 titles were later purchased. The most popular titles included books on diverse topics like fan culture and the popular media, capital risk management, a survival manual for using the SPSS data analysis program and Law textbooks.

The trial has been so successful that the Library has agreed to continue offering this electronic book purchase program in 2009.

24 September 2008

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