Outline and overview

Electronic books have taken much longer than electronic journals to be accepted into the mainstream of academic library collections. This chapter reviews the experiences of one UK academic library in developing its e-book collection, some of the impacts it has had on processes and workflows and the analysis that has been carried out. It outlines how this has helped us to understand what gets used and why, and what the most costeffective methods are to build an e-books collection that meets user needs. Finally, the chapter considers some of the challenges that lie ahead.

A history of e-books at the University of Liverpool

The University of Liverpool (UoL) is a Russell Group (i.e. research intensive) University, founded in 1881, with about 17,000 FTE students. Its library occupies two buildings on either side of the university precinct. In common with most UK academic libraries it has transitioned its journal subscriptions from predominantly print, via combined print+online subscriptions for a time, to online-only where possible.

Although UoL Library had provided access to online products such as Early English Books Online and online reference works like the Grove Dictionary of Music and the Oxford English Dictionary Online since the early 2000s, its first steps in ‘proper’ e-books were tentative: a single biology textbook and six Oxford Handbooks in medicine, all acquired on subscription. The uptake was disappointing, though perhaps not too surprising given that there were only seven e-books among about two million print books in the library catalogue. The Oxford Handbooks were not renewed after the first year due to poor usage (though a subscription to twice as many titles was started again in March 2011) and the biology textbook continued for several years with a moderate level of usage until the publisher changed hands and the book ceased to be made available online.

In the autumn of 2005, the library started to support a cohort of online students, the vast majority of them based overseas, for whom the physical library was utterly irrelevant. An attempt was made to establish a critical mass of content in computing and business/management through a subscription to Safari. The Safari model employs ‘slots’ which the library fills with books that typically occupy between 0.5 and 2 slots each.