Recent E-Book consortium model changes in university libraries in Korea and its utilization

Abstract

Since KERIS initiated the e-book consortia in the year 2002, e-books have played an important role to balance the collection of books irrespective of the size of libraries and a method of joint acquisitions was applied to the consortia.

This research is conducted with overall consortia models of online resources by KERIS (Korea Education & Research Information Service). The purpose of the study is to comprehensively investigate Korean consortia models, recent changes in the consortium modeling process and e-book usage by way of title selection. Also, it introduces how the consortium governing body, KERIS manages the e-book consortium effectively from a Korean perspective. The e-book consortium modeling process specifically entailed the following: identifying an appropriate consortium model, sampling the consortium size for pricing models and selecting the criteria for e-book title selection.

E-book consortium models are categorized according to subscription methods, title selection and the number of copies needed for purchase by the consortium. First, there are 2 types of e-book consortium models on how the consortia subscribes. One is the lease model paying for the selected title every year and having an annual access. The other is the purchase model having a perpetual access. As for the KERIS e-book consortium subscription model, it could not be continued since the librarians had difficulty in paying the e-book content fees every year and renewing the license. So, both sharing and purchasing options are preferred and regarded as quite cost-effective for Korean universities since they try to balance their digital and paper collections. Second, owing to the multiple copy requests from publishers for the last 3 years, the consortium has been changed from a one copy consortium to multiple copies and it has affected the title selection. In detail focusing on the netLibrary e-book consortium, title selection has been modified 3 times due to the consortium policy changes of the publishers. In the beginning, every university selected a title they would like to buy and shared the total collection. Since the year 2005 publishers have started to request multiple copies, the university who needed the title from multiple-copy publishers should buy the total consortium copies of each title needed. From the year 2006 all the publishers requested multiple copies for the consortia and negotiated the minimum number of copies of each title according to the number of participating libraries.

One more thing to analyze is the usage analysis of the policy of the publishers - one-copy share model, multiple-copies share model - by subject and by title compared to the 2005 and 2006 collections, For 6 consecutive years 107 unique universities have been participating and approximately 42,230 titles are currently in the KERIS e-book consortia. It led to the discovery of a few usage patterns in Korea and suggests reasonable volume quality and quantity and policy on the consortia collection management.