 Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's live value, accessing the value of e-books, academic libraries, and users' webcasts. At this time, all lines have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions and comments following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question during a webcast, you may do so by clicking on the Ask a Question button located below the slide. Simply type your question into that box and hit send. At this time, it is my pleasure to move over to Martha Kitty Lidoo. The floor is yours. Thank you. I'm Martha Kitty Lidoo, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the third of six webcasts on our LiveValue IMLS grant. Today's webcast is on assessing the value of e-books to academic libraries and users. And we would like to thank you for joining us. And just a couple of logistics. Everyone, as you heard, is muted to cut down on background noise. We do welcome questions, though. Please type your questions on, and we send ready to answer all of them, questions and answers that we do not address, as well as the ones we address during the webcast will be distributed to attendees after the webcast, along with the recording that will be available on YouTube. I would like to take a minute to briefly mention all the people that will be featured in today's webcast. So we have here today with us Paula Kaufman, who is the Dean of Libraries and University Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also the co-PI of the LiveValue grant together with Carol Tenopier from the University of Tennessee. The second presenter with us today is Tina Krastovsky. She is a chemistry librarian and professor of library administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And our third presenter is Lynn Wiley, and she is the head of acquisitions and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Now what we are going to try to cover today is we're going to help you become familiar with the LiveValue project, specifically the e-book component of that research that has taken place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We want to discuss how libraries value e-books via data collection and cost-use analysis. Also discuss how library users value e-books via survey data that have been collected from UIUC scientists by Elsevier that took place in the fall of 2010. And we want to present updated e-book user data via the latest study that is taking place on humanist use of e-books that's currently underway. And as a brief background, this is the, you know, today's webcast, the third one, there are, there have been two that have already taken place. There are three more that are scheduled, and they are basically covering a rather complex set of research protocols that we've been testing over the last three years. We have multiple institutions in this ground using multiple methods to measure multiple types of values to multiple types of stakeholders. And it's also a partnership that includes IMLF, includes ARL, the two institutions where the two COPI's are representing the University of Tennessee. As I mentioned, Carol Tendoper is there and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where Cola Pulfman is the COPI. We also have Syracuse University involved. The next webcast actually includes Bruce Kinma from Syracuse University. And we've had a partnership of the GISC collections where Carol Tendoper collected data from GISC. Now part of the Association of Research Libraries agenda is the development of a variety of different tools and we have over the years have created a gateway known as the stats call gateway to library assessment tools. And the gateway includes a number of different protocols that describe their role, character and impact of both physical and digital components of our research libraries. All of that historically builds on the ARL statistics, a very traditional descriptive data collection but, you know, about 10, 12 years ago we developed live call that focuses on the perspective of the users. More recently climate call looks into issues of organizational climate. And the protocols, research protocols like digital that was funded from NSF and an operational protocol that is known as Mines for Libraries. That stands for measuring the impact of network electronic services. This is a protocol that we've used specifically to evaluate the use of electronic resources, their purpose of use and we are actually implementing now in the coming year components that will focus on the cost per use too. Actually if you'll hear at the end of this presentation I'm trying to bring into this webcast a couple of other studies and Mines for Libraries has been used for the assessment of eBooks so I'll give you the reference at the end of this presentation. Now before we go too far I do want to engage you in telling us a couple of things about your approach to these issues. There is a poll question I'm going to push to you and the poll question says are you engaged in a systematic assessment of the value of eBooks as part of your library purchases. So I'm going to pose the question to you and I'm going to give you a few minutes to click and give us an answer. Are you engaged in a systematic assessment of the value of eBooks as part of your library purchases? Let me look at the preview quickly. Okay, as your answers are coming back I'm going to stop the question and I'm going to tell you a little bit, you can see the results there. 31% said yes, 48% said no, and 20% said that you are planning one. So there is some work being done, there seems to be that there is a lot more work that can be done in this area. So let's hear a little bit about the work that's taking place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Paula Kosman. We will come next and tell us a little bit more. Paula? Thanks Martha. I just want to take a couple of minutes to give you some context. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a research intensive, comprehensive public land grant institution. We have the second largest population of international students of any university in the country. And we are science intensive, although we are certainly strong in other areas. Engineering, physics, biology are really our stock in trade. We became involved in an early return on investment study that Elsevier sponsored back in I think it was 2006 in which we looked at the return on investment as measured by the library's participation or support for competitive research grant funds. And that turned out to be a return for every dollar that the university invested in the library of $4.38. So while we were not involved in the phase two of this project, which really took that worldwide, we are now very much engaged in the live value process. And Tina and Lynn are going to tell you about the e-book studies that we've been doing. So I'll turn this over to you, Tina. Okay. Thank you, Paula. Basically, we asked two questions before we started this research. What is the value of e-books to libraries? And what is the value of e-books to users? Because these are the two important players. Publishers are also a very important part of this. But we focused our research on both libraries and library users. We looked at a lot of different data sets in order to answer these questions. Value can be defined both in a financial sense and in the esteem sense. So we wanted to be able to capture quantitative and qualitative data to try to answer some of these questions. So these are the data sets that we look at and that we'll be talking in detail about later in this talk. We looked at collection growth, use and cost data and cost per use data for e-books for all the data that we could gather for UIUC. And that turned out to be back to basically about 2008. We also were very fortunate to participate with Elsevier again in another study that was conducted in fall of 2010. And this is the more qualitative part of the research and we'll be looking specifically at that study. Martha, do you want to ask your poll question here? There it is. I have my mute. Thank you. Tino will actually tell you a little bit about how UIUC is behaving on this question that I'm posing here to you and the question is in front of you. So I want to make sure that the answers are coming. What is going to happen, the question is what is going to happen to the amount of money you spend on e-books next year? Is it going to decrease? Is it going to stay the same? Is it going to increase? I'm going to stop the question and I'm going to show you the results and let's see what you are seeing. Only 2% think that the amount of e-books is going to decrease. 16% say the amount is going to stay the same and 81% responded that the amount spent on e-books is going to increase. Another indicator that this is in the area where more assessment and evaluation and good data are needed. Tino? Yes. Thank you. So we're going to move on to look at our e-book growth in the last five years or so. I'd like to first talk a little bit about how the data are very ballpark, probably more coliseum type ballpark than you might think. Because it's been very difficult to think about e-books and go back and study when we haven't really had good conversations in our libraries about how to quantify what we're buying, how to separate out what we're spending. And a lot of times these are major purchases that are done maybe at the end of the year. And so even when you purchase them, the use may not show up until the following year. So there's a whole lot of ballpark going on here. But I think the important thing is to just do it, is to try to get those numbers down, get as much confidence as you can in them and then look at trends and try to figure out what's going on with trends. So the first slide looks at overall e-book growth at UIUC over time. And if you look at this, you can see that there are some definite trends going on here. We now have almost 70,000 e-books and in fact I'm sure we have more than 700,000 e-books. Things have, it looks like we've added about 70 to 71,000 e-books per year since 2008. Okay, next slide shows about what we've spent on those and how much we can sort of guesstimate that we're looking at how much we spent on each e-book. Just to give a sense of how this relates to print is that we did a study in Carly not too long ago that looked at consortial purchase of monographs. And when we looked from 2003 to 2008, the average cost of a print book was $64.55. So you can see that e-books are really very, very cost effective to purchase, especially in large quantities when you can get a package. And one of the theories that's been kind of battered around in a lot of the literature is that short-term costs, in other words the acquisition costs of e-books can be high, but that the long-term costs are low. But what we found is actually that both are quite low. The short-term costs can be low and definitely the long-term costs can be low. So the next slide looks a little bit about how we've defined use. And as you all know, use statistics, they're out there, they're not easy to get. It's a laborious process to put it not too easily. So for the purpose of this study, the use of an e-book was counted when a user successfully viewed or downloaded a section, usually a chapter, but it could be any section depending upon how the publisher used that definition from an e-book through the vendor portal. And we're using counter-book report statistics, book report number two, which does look at section requests by both month and title. The problem with this is that in our first study, when we first looked at this in 2011, we could only get use statistics from about 82% of publishers that we were buying e-books from. And of those, only 75% use counter-compliant statistics. So the whole point here is that even though we are able to measure use, a lot of it is undercounting. You know, just a question has come through. I think you sort of answered it, but let's make sure. It's asking, are you counting separately subscription, database, e-books, not really owned plus go away if you cancel versus owned e-books? We are counting both. We are able to count both through both things like eBriary and EBSCO. I'm thinking that's what they're referring to, Safari. Yes, we're including all of those data. And you'll see that in a couple of slides from now. Thank you. So when we look at this cost use data, one of the things that jumps out of us is this, basically the trends that are going on here. And again, this is very much ballpark data. It's undercounting use, I believe. We're getting much better and much more confident in the number of dollars that we're spending on e-books. I think that we're all seeing that this is such a trend that we're probably doing a much better and more careful job of coding these purchases correctly in our acquisition system. I think we're also doing a much better job of counting the numbers of e-books that we have, although this is still very dicey business because of the question that just came in. How many e-burry might change the number of e-books before we've even had a chance to count them? So what we can look at here, though, is we do know that the average that we're spending on e-books has increased. And I think that that's something that you can sort of look at and say that we have purchased so many large packages in the past. And those packages often come at lower costs. And we're getting to the point now where we're buying more individual, more publisher groups instead of large packages which has raised the cost. And I think just the cost of e-books is going up in general. One of the things that, again, that I wanted to point out here is just the very low, excuse me, the way that the trends for total uses has just increased over time, just as we would expect it to do. And the other thing that I wanted to point out on this slide is that in our monograph study, again that I mentioned earlier where the average cost of a book was about $65, we also did cost use and found that for monographs that cost use in that consortium was $18 to $35 per use. It's not at all fair to compare the cost of or the use of print monographs with e-monographs, but it's interesting to talk about. So the next slide shows a little bit of, we kind of wanted to think about the 80-20 rule in some extent. So we looked at the top 10 publishers of e-books by use. So our number one e-book vendor is Springer. They also do probably the very best job of discovery and discovery at the chapter level, so it's really no surprise that they ended up on top. It was surprising to me that Safari ended up so much on top on our list because we had at that time in 2012 where these data are from. We had a cap on the number of simultaneous users, and I think that cap was about six users. So we also know that Safari is used regularly as reserve books for classes in engineering specifically, but the computer engineering very much so. So these numbers could be a lot higher, and in fact in 2013, this year, we've gotten rid of that cap and it's going to obviously make a big difference in the tally when we look at it next year. So this slide shows too that the top 10 publishers are producing or we subscribe to 63% for our total e-books, but that accounts for 91% of total use, a whole lot of use. Overall, I'm on to the next slide. Overall, we try to take a look at what it means to own an e-book versus what it means to own a print book. And luckily, this research has been done, and I would very much recommend taking a look at this article on the cost of keeping a book. And this table is something that I use regularly when I speak of that e-book because I think it gives a really good broad sense that it really is much more cost effective to own an e-book than it is to own a print book. And some of the things that we learned from this study are that e-books have a low cost per e-book purchase. They have a low cost per use. They are more cost effective to lend and to store and to preserve than print. The accessibility is greater. In other words, people can use this from 24-7 anywhere in the world. I'm on the next slide, Martha, if you want to move on. Yeah. Before we go to the value, I do want to bring a question to your attention, the same from the audience. It's in relation to some of the 2012 numbers. That person thought that, well, he asked, why is 2012, why 2012 seemed to be an outlier in your data? It shows fewer titles purchased, but more money spent. Well, I asked that question myself, and I've gone back and checked with pretty much everybody involved with this. And we're all kind of holding on to those numbers. And I think there's a couple of reasons. The first one is that we have gotten much, much, much better on coding these purchases correctly that they are e-book purchases. I think we were definitely undercounting the money we were spending in previous years. So because I had been asking this question and acquisitions and e-resources have been needing to come up with this number, everybody's gotten much more careful about making sure that we do make the distinction between print and e. And I think the other reason is that we did go through a huge sort of peak in buying, and we're just not getting the numbers that we used to. We got a much lower cost per e-book in the big packages than we did when we're finally, we own all those packages now. Now we're getting down to sort of a more granular level of purchasing. Lynn, would you agree with that? Do you have any other reasons that you might think of? I think you nailed that, Tina. That is absolutely what I think is happening. We're seeing a lot more title by title purchasing, or we're seeing that we're buying some things by the slice, subject slices of some of the presses, and they are more expensive. And I've seen that too just as a chemistry selector, is that I bought a lot of the big packages when I had that chance. The costs were really very attractive. And now when I have to buy book by book by book, the prices are going up. So now we can go back to, let me see, that I have the right slide for you from the perspective of library value. Yes, that's right. So we know a lot of these things, and this is sort of the quantitative piece of that, is that we can say with pretty good assurance that this would be a great move for libraries. But the most important thing is, next slide, what do our users think? How will they attract? If they're not gonna use them, it doesn't help for us to have and build these collections. So even though we see the use going up, can we ask them a little bit more specifically to give us their sense of what e-books means to them? And luckily we were involved with a study done in 2010, fall of 2010 by Elsevier. And this gets a lot more at that esteem point of view. We want to know what do they think of e-books? How are they using them? What are the problems, et cetera, et cetera. So the survey methodology was pretty straightforward. In October of 2010, we sent out a mass email. First of course, we got our IRB permissions, all lined up and in order. And then we sent out our invitation and by October 15th of that year, we had over 400 people volunteering to participate in the study. And at that point, Elsevier said, whoa, quit recruiting. So we stopped recruiting and they were able to sift through all the people that volunteered and they came up with 129 people that they chose then to participate. And this was a worldwide global study that Elsevier conducted. And so we were just a part of the US piece of that. There were other CIC libraries, I think that were involved. So participants were asked to basically start up with a questionnaire that asked them questions about what their format preferences were, what their reading habits were. Then they were asked to, in their discipline, to conduct a search on ScienceDirect or any platform to locate a ScienceDirect book, an Elsevier book, and to read that book, use that book, and then to create and answer a logbook diary, basically, of questions that Elsevier posed concerning their use of that book. They were given up to four weeks to complete the study and they were asked to look at at least two but no more than four eBooks. So we asked these questions and basically you can see here that most of the respondents were from the physical sciences. I'm not sure whether that's because Elsevier wanted to study the physical sciences, but I think it's more likely that more physical sciences, science people just volunteered for the study. And the reason for that I think is that in actual, most of these orange people are chemists, which I was kind of proud to see them volunteering. But I think the reason that they felt they wanted to volunteer was because they felt so comfortable with eBooks. In chemistry, I've been buying large collections, small collections, everything I could get, and these might be their only access points to those books. So they were very comfortable with e, and I felt that those are the kind of people that say, oh, an eBook study, I could do that. I think the thing to notice here though is very few humanists and social scientists were included. So even though some of the slides ahead include these people by subject discipline, it's really not probably the best thing to look at in terms of abuse by discipline. So most of the researchers were actually PhD students. Elsevier, I think Dave probably one of the largest, please take our survey incentives I've ever seen. It was a $100 gift voucher to Amazon. So that's probably why we had 400 people volunteer in two weeks. But they did get it down to this group of people which included 114 PhD students and about 15 faculty. When we looked at their preferred form of scholarly book use, it was really pretty interesting to me that it's right down the middle. Very few people had no opinion, which I thought was also interesting. But for this to come out split this way, I thought was really interesting. Faculty, which is the next slide, are a little bit more leaning towards the electronic, but not really by much. Not anything that matters, I would say. So we also asked them how frequently they use printed scholarly books. And the answers were pretty straightforward. That I think that most people have the assumption that scientists don't use books that they just use journal articles, but that's totally untrue. And I think that this proves it because if you add up daily, weekly, or monthly, it's about 61%. So a lot of scientists are using books and a lot of scientists are using e-books. We asked them how often they search for electronic or printed books. In other words, how often are they just looking for a book? And again, if you add up the daily or weekly basis, that comes to nearly half. So these are pretty frequent searchers of e-books too. And just to clarify, one of the participants is asking, how did Elsevier choose those people? Can you repeat that part? I'm not really sure. Other than they were volunteers from the University of Illinois that responded to an email message that said, if you would like to participate in this e-book study, it's going to involve reading e-books and filling out a logbook and that you'll be giving a $100 voucher to Amazon should you choose to reply. So even though there were 400 people for them to choose from, they never really told me how they chose the final 129 participants. Okay, thank you. So I think, there we go. This was interesting to me because the question was, apart from using ScienceDirect, which other methods did you use in this information search? This has to give librarians pause because when you look at the number of Google and Google Scholar searches, you need to realize that this is still a major way that people are accessing or trying to find information even about e-books or any discipline that they're interested in. Oh, I just lost my train of thought. Anyway, 85%, I mean, this is a large number of people. Oh, I know what I was going to say. You have to get your e-book discovery information into these different ways of accessing. People aren't always going to come to your catalog to find an e-book. So you've got to think about very carefully how you're going to make these discovery tools available. And I think that this slide just makes that point very clearly. Then there was a lot of the information and the findings that came out of this study are just sort of no-brainer things that can easily be confirmed by other studies, but it's also just reassuring to know that we're kind of on that same page. And this is one of those. My usage of printed or electronic books for research purposes is characterized by, and this just shows that people are using bits of information from a book or chapters, one or two chapters. Usually when they want to read an entire book, they choose a physical print book instead of e. And I think that's going to be really good for us to have these type of data linked to the year that that study is done because I think we're going to see a shift in this over time. That's one of my predictions. And the next slide basically says the same thing in a little bit different way, but when you see that less than 10% of these respondents say that they read the whole book, it's just very clear that heavy usage comes from print books and moderate to light usage is at this point in time anyway, coming from e-books. I think you need to move on slide-wise. We are right. This completely supports other studies findings too. These are one of the main advantages of e-books and obviously it's that 24 seven access that people are really excited about. It makes our libraries open all the time. Online access, easy to search and navigate, being able to download, easy storage, et cetera, et cetera. So these again, no big surprise here. People love the access and availability 24 seven. The next slide looks a little bit more at behavior and what people do with e-books. These things are not wildly different from in between disciplines, but I think that the important point here is not what people are doing with e-books, but what they don't want to do with e-books. And I think that this slide sends a real important message to publishers who are so worried about what people are going to do that might be illegal, that they worry about their product. But this slide shows that people really don't want to copy and paste. They're not interested in printing this out and they certainly don't want to share it with colleagues. So I think that we can use data like these to say, you know, we are responsible users and e-books are great things to own and we're not going to abuse them. When we've asked some value questions, this is just a little bit more that sort of confirms the behavior that we've seen in the previous slide. So if we can say that future behavior is a predictor of this value, it sort of makes a little more sense. People don't spend time doing things that they don't value, even when you're paying them to participate. So what we see here is that again, copy and pasting not important, making a print not important, but downloading a PDF, yes, that's very important. Reading from the screen and taking that brief look. We also asked when comparing the above mentioned results from when comparing the above mentioned results with a retrieved Elsevier e-book in this information search, how do you rate the value that you've received from this e-book? And when we look at this together, need to have, in other words, that oh my gosh, I must own this, may not be relatively high, about 13%, but when you add it to that, boy, this would be really nice to have, then you get somewhere definitely over half 67, almost 70%, say that they either would like to have the book or they would need to have the book. And this is, the total number of e-books that we estimated were read during the entire study is about 800. So overall, when thinking about how e-books are used by our users and liked or disliked by our users, they really like to have that 24-7 accessibility. They're using multiple search engines to locate these e-books. Most of them think they either need to have or nice to have an e-book. They're not likely to share these things with colleagues, e-books with colleagues, print them out or be cutting and pasting. They're likely to be read off the screen or briefly viewed. And they do like to have the ability to download either some portion of the book or the entire book. We did get quite a few comments in the comment box that talked about all the difficulties with e-books because it wasn't an easy survey to take. And so despite these difficulties with access, there really continues to be strong interest. So I think that a lot of e-book users feel they're swimming upstream now, but they feel that it's worth it. And that last point came from comment boxes, which were really actually sort of varied from the tone of the non-comment boxes. And in the comment boxes, they felt a little more free to tell us what they really thought. And they were positive, but somewhat frustrated, as most of us are, I think, with e-books at this point in time. So the point about the Elsevier study is that it was heavily geared towards the sciences. And as we realized that, we thought more about if we could take this to the next level, where would we go? And we decided that that would be to take a really good look at what humanists think about e-books. So we're in phase two or phase three, if you want to kind of multiply those phases out. And it's become very interesting. I'm going to let Lynn take over from this point and talk a little bit about the humanities e-book project. Yeah. And before we go to Lynn, let's take one question from the audience. It's actually coming from University College Dublin, so in Ireland. And it may speak to the aspect of the frustration or the behavior modification and expectation that's happening with e-books. The question asks and states, most packages don't allow you to copy and paste. So does this influence their answers in terms of how they use e-books? If this capability is not there, then most people will say that they are not going to be doing this capability. And I would invite all three of you to share your perspectives on this. We can start with Tina. Well, I think you're probably right. But I think that this capability was allowed, and that's why Elsa Bear asked the question. But again, I would have to verify that. I can jump in a little bit. This is Lynn. I think there might be just a little bit of an issue with the definition of what a package is. So when we look at something like the Springer, we bought that as a package. But we own that material, and they are fully downloadable. And our preference is always to buy direct from a publisher and to allow full capabilities of use. But having said that, yes, there are some things where there are some more DRMs on those, some more limitations. But by far, the majority of the material can have a wide use. One more. Paula, would you like to share a perspective here, or shall we move on to the next question? Yeah, let's move to the next question. It's an interesting one. It says, how do you think your results might have been different if the study weren't limited to Elsa Bear, but also included others, like Ibrahim Ibrahim? Well, I think we have to just continue to study this. I think that it's obvious that these were a chosen set of users in a certain subject area looking at a specific platform. So I think that Elsa Bear was looking to obviously get good information from these users about their platform. But it may not translate to other users and other platforms. So I think that we need to continue to study that. And the problem is, of course, is that those, the frustration comes because they do use other platforms, and they know that other capabilities are available, or not, depending upon the publisher and the platform that you're using. And I think this is an important point to make in terms of all of our live value studies. We're very, very early into this whole process, and it's going to be, I think, a decades-long process before we have enough tools and enough data to get a complete picture of the value that libraries give to their users and to their funders. So I think we just have to put things in context and understand that we're really at a very early stage. And the more of you who participate, the further we can push the limits and the boundaries of what we understand. Thank you. Let's see, there are a couple more questions coming. And one has to do with whether, in the screening of the participants, as they identified print or e-book preference before they chose the participants. Were there any screening questions? No, no, they chose the users and there were no screening questions except those that had already been accepted into the study, then they asked that group what their reading preferences were. So they, as far as I know, they didn't pre-screen anyone. And I don't really know the parameters that they were looking for. It might have been just the first people that I will ask Elsevier and see if I can find that out. Yeah, sort of a convenience approach. Right. Little reading habits, how and reading preferences, how do the humanities look like? Lynne? Yeah, thank you. This is Lynne Wiley and I was delighted to be approached by Tina this summer to see if we could go ahead and do something similar but look from a humanities point of view. We buy many, many print books in the humanities and we have a very strong collection across the humanities. But we were really curious about why haven't we had more of a push to buy more e-books in the humanities? It is more difficult, obviously, to get some of the books in the humanities because you're talking about a much larger corpus of material and we don't necessarily buy all the output from one publisher. But we wanted to just study this more. So we looked at this as phase two of the e-book research and it was initiated in the fall of 2012. And we looked at two aspects of this where how were we going to study content in use of the humanities? There are, it's a huge comatail of material. We did not want to focus on just one publisher's content. We wanted to look at an opportunity to provide to our users some selection of that content. So that is why we turned to what eBury offers as a third-party vendor dealing with a great deal of publishers and we wanted to see if we could then match some humanities content to those offerings and then offer that back to our users on a Purchase on Demand program where we were doing the purchase for them. And some details about that we'll follow in the next slide but eBury became our vendor and then we wanted to follow that up with a survey of the e-book's use by the humanities. And we worked directly with the humanities bibliographers. If you can go back to that previous slide, I want to just mention briefly the different disciplines. I can get that back again. But basically we worked with the bibliographers who were in the area of architecture, art and art history, the classics, bibliographer, history, music and religion. So we told them, we would want to involve them in this study and that we asked them also to look at the content that we were getting from eBury to see which records we were going to end up loading into our online catalog. We can go to the next slide then. There it is. So we are in the middle of some of this right now. I can't share all the information about the survey because we are actually collecting that right now. But the survey was an online survey. It overlaps a great deal with the survey that was done for the sciences. We asked format questions. We asked use questions, preference questions, any barrier questions. But we're in the middle of that right now. And we, as I mentioned, we worked with those bibliographers to help target very focused populations. And we were in control of deciding who to distribute this information to. So the same disciplines that I mentioned, we actually directed emails to faculty and graduate students in those disciplines. For the eBury Purchase on Demand project, we set up several meetings with eBury. We decided to work directly with them rather than through our monographic vendor because we really wanted to examine the content that they could offer. So we ended up looking at over 200,000 items and winnowed that way down to only then include about 7,000 imprints that covered those disciplines. And let me just spend a little bit of time talking about that. We were very careful in picking that content. Again, because we wanted to have very good academic material, so we were careful in the publishers, in the disciplines covered, we removed the serial information, we removed non-academic content to really get to a nice group. And we made sure that we weren't overlapping, of course, with any other ebook content that we had bought. We also looked at, we examined that content to see what the overlap was with our print because one of the issues that we're looking at is choosing print over E. And that is also part of this whole project. We had a grad assistant who was working directly with that material as things were used by a user to examine, was there a print copy available at the same time? So that was part of the study as well. So I do have a slide to show you just a little bit of preliminary information on the next slide. So I do want to just mention here that in working with Ebrary, we elected not to go with a trigger situation. The 7,000 records that we identified were loaded into our catalog to be explored and used totally transparently by our users, but we elected to do the short-term loan. And that's because we were very aware of that content, humanity's content is gonna be used a little bit differently. We didn't want to necessarily purchase everything. We wanted to see where people were and let them have a full use, a short-term loan of that book, and then we would buy it on the third short-term loan of that book. And what that did is allowed us to see full use by a whole variety of users of all that content as we loaded it into the system. And we're very happy that we did do the short-term loan route because it has given us that comet-tail look of this content. So at this point in time, we have seen since late November is when these records were loaded, we have seen at the time that the slide was put together, 373. I think we're up to close to 500 right now actually, actually look at this daily because I see them come flying across my screen. But we've seen transactions that total close to 500 at this point and that means short-term loans. That means users were using the material. They might download a chapter, they might be viewing, they might be printing and it might be different users across that group. But we only purchased a short, a small list of those were purchased. At this point we're up to about 25, 26 titles purchased but it really enabled us to see without having to spend a lot of money yet exactly what our users are interested in looking at from an e-book perspective. Next slide please. And I think that's turning over to Tia at this point. Yep, we're ready for our conclusions and there they are. E-books offer value to the library in both a monetary way and in that esteemed usefulness way. YMMD is your mileage may differ and I think local use is very important as in any format local use is very important so your mileage may differ. Caronta Nielsen showed us that it's really more inexpensive to own e-books than print books. They offer great value to patrons who like that accessibility, that portability, the search navigation and capabilities and unfortunately we know that there is still plenty of room for improvement and the next slide shows that these sort of the problems that still remain with e-books and all this non-standard, the differences between vendors is really, really confusing and so non-standard here really means confusing to users, downloading policies, what can I cut and paste? Which are locally available to me? Why are the discovery tools different? What's the digital rights management issues that are involved? Is perpetual use guaranteed or is it not in some cases? And the fact that there's just not enough content in some disciplines, I think that people are really clamoring to find out more. Whenever these issues have been addressed and brought up in article after article that are out there right now, nearly every single one comes to the same conclusion and that is we're going to fix this, we are going to solve these problems but it's gonna take some time, it's gonna take maybe five to 10 years. So I think that, as Paula mentioned, we need to just continue to collect our data, to talk to our users, to find out what their frustrations are, how we can help fix them and then just watch it take off. That's great. And some of the questions that have just come in, Tina, I'll speak to this sort of changing landscape. One of the questions, one of the attendees was shocked by the low number of users who wanted to copy, paste materials from e-books in what we showed them. In their experience, especially with undergraduates, there is frustration when they are unable to copy and paste small amounts. Any thoughts in relation to how undergraduates may be different? I think everybody is frustrated by that. Go ahead, Paula. I was just gonna say we didn't study, we didn't include undergraduates in our study so it's a little hard to draw those conclusions except from experience. Yeah, so I concur too on the, we know that the undergraduates can be frustrated about that but that is also changing. So again, and just going back to the points made on how some of this, we are following an evolution here, there are a little bit of lightning of those DRMs, the Digital Rights Management, they're not quite as limited as they used to be. We're seeing a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel there so that's loosening up a little bit. And also for those scientists using the books that Tina was talking about, those packages were allowing for full access so you didn't see the same kind of limitations there. Mm-hmm. And I believe there was mention of part of a little print and e-book studies, Quran and Nielsen was mentioned but also Tina, you mentioned something about CIC studies about the cost per use of the print books. One of the questions that's coming from Wayne State University points out that there is a demand for parallel studies of the value of print books purchased in the same years. And do you not then have to determine the value of the print collection in comparison? But the problem with comparing print and e is that you check a print book out and it could be gone for four months to four years to four days but an e-book can generate so much more use that it's really not fair to compare them. I think it's interesting to look at the totals but the opportunities are so much broader and wider with e-books that they're really not comparable. Yeah, in different environments. Another attendee from George Washington University this time has a special issue, personal issue with inability to export notes and highlights from many of the platforms. Did this come up in any of the comments? No, not that I remember. Most of the comments were, why can't I open this? They gave me access to this and I can't get to it. And it was really, they used the comment boxes in the Elsevier study to rant a little bit. I didn't see that ranting though, however. Thank you. So we will bring closure to this webcast but I do want to mention that we are planning a session with Paula, Tina and Lynn at ALA in Chicago on June 28th during the library assessment forum that usually takes place from 1.30 to three o'clock on Friday before ALA and they'll be able to bring more up to date information regarding the Humanities Project and we'll be there to answer a lot more questions since we know this is a changing landscape. Let me see, there was one more question. Whether we've looked at the issues related to e-readers. Oh, no, not at all. I think that's an excellent question though. We did ask that a little in our humanity study. Oh, in the humanity study, yes, you're right. It didn't come up in Elsevier but yes, the humanity study does ask that question so it'll be interesting to see. We currently have about 135 responses to that survey so we're hoping for a few more and we should have some real good data by June. Yeah, right. So this is clearly a changing landscape and as you mentioned, there is a number of studies coming out. I have highlighted three resources here that are also looking into e-books. The two references, the two references listed first here were presentations of the Library Assessment Conference last October in Charlottesville. Ravi David from the University of Toronto and Dana Thomas from Ryerson University, both of them working with the Scholar's Portal information and data. So they presented a paper entitled It's All in the Method Data Towards a Better QA for e-books. Primly Franklin and Terry Plum presented a paper on the Minds for Libraries Methodology as applied to e-books. The proceedings, the PowerPoint presentations from the Library Assessment Conference are available on the Library Assessment Conference website that you are at with libraryassessment.org. The proceedings will be available this summer. There was a paper at the ACRM Conference in Indianapolis that recently took place by Chan and Kendall and the title of that is identifying users of demand-driven e-book programs, applications for collection development. So lots of emerging interest in this area. I do want to remind everybody that we have another webcast coming on May 9th and we will have Don King and Bruce Kinma talking about comprehensive approaches to measuring library value. We hope to see many of you there and on behalf of our three speakers, Paula, Tina, and Lynn, and myself and all the people involved in the LibValue project, we want to thank you and a special thanks to UIUC graduate assistants Dan Tracy and William Weathers and to Wendy Shelbourne, Michael Norman and Elphi Bier and this research could not have been possible without the generous funding we've received from IMLS. Thank you everybody. Thank you. Let us conclude today's webcast. We thank you for participating. You may not disconnect your line and have a great day. Thank you Patrick.