Re: Building collections at all

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Production managers at most publishers will shudder to learn that 
the Espresso machine will come into common use, unless its use is 
restricted to the production of books that are otherwise 
unavailable. The quality of book production will deteriorate 
badly if the Espresso becomes the standard. It's like people 
getting used to reading the 300 dpi that comes off of 
photocopiers instead of the 1200 to 2200 dpi that is typical for 
printed books. There goes some of the "value added" that 
publishers pride themselves on....

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> > collection-building in these very difficult times and have been
>>  struck by the fact that there is little discussion of testing
>>  on-demand services.
>
>Joe, there is a actually quite a lot of discussion going on in
>the library world around this issue, and experiments are in fact
>being conducted.  Greg and Scott have both alluded to some of
>them.  At my institution we're in the second phase of a fairly
>large-scale experiment with on-demand ebook purchasing using a
>system whereby many ebook records are loaded into our catalog and
>only those that are actually used by patrons get purchased and
>added to our permanent collection -- records for the unused
>titles eventually disappear.  A good number of other research
>libraries are conducting similar tests.  We're also looking very
>seriously at purchasing an Espresso Book Machine, which would
>allow us to print and bind books on demand -- selling them to
>patrons where ownership is desired, and adding them to our
>collections (with exceptions) where it isn't.  (Given our
>relatively poor track record at guessing what people will want,
>demonstrated patron interest in a particular title seems like as
>good a collecting criterion as any.)
>
>Here's the really radical question, though: why are most of us
>building permanent collections at all anymore?  As Greg pointed
>out, in very many cases we can now respond to patrons' expressed
>needs quickly enough that buying speculatively seems like a poor
>use of money -- especially in the current budget environment.
>It's already kind of silly for patrons to use our catalogs as
>discovery tools, since any library's collection represents only a
>tiny fraction of the material that is actually available on any
>given topic.  Since our patrons tend now to be searching through
>a much larger segment of the information universe than we could
>ever hope to collect ahead of time, why don't we focus on fast
>fulfillment rather than wasting money on stuff no one wants?
>
>Rick Anderson
>Assoc. Dir. For Scholarly Resources & Collections
>Marriott Library
>Univ. of Utah
>rick.anderson@utah.edu


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