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Ask a Collections Development Librarian
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Ask a Collections Development Librarian
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DAVID MYERS: Thank you, and welcome to today's Ask the Experts panel. We are very pleased you can join us today for our discussion on collections development. My name is David Myers, SSP Education Committee Member and Lead Publisher at Wolters Kluwer. Before we get started, I want to thank our 2022 educational sponsors, ARPHA, J&J Editorial, OpenAthens, and Silverchair. We are grateful for their support.
DAVID MYERS: I also have a few housekeeping items to review-- your phones have been muted automatically. Please use the Q&A feature to enter the questions. Do not use the chat. The moderator will be looking at the Q&A panel. Our agenda today is to cover whatever questions you may have for our speakers. So please don't be shy about participating. This one-hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's broadcast.
DAVID MYERS: At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback to help shape future SSP programming. It is now my pleasure to introduce our moderator today, Amy Pawlowski, Executive Director at OhioLINK. Amy has nearly 20 years experience in special, public, and academic libraries and library-related private industry, with expertise in library technology and the e-books, e journals publishing ecosystem.
DAVID MYERS: Working with the library deans and directors on OhioLINK's Library Advisory Council and reporting to the Ohio Department of Higher Education, she's responsible for the organization's vision and directing strategic projects and continues to lead contract negotiations for consortial scholarly electronic resources. And now, I will turn it over to you, Amy.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you so much. And welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Before I get started, I want to introduce our wonderful speakers on the panel today. So with me is Jessica Morales. Jessica is the Director of Collections Strategy and Acquisitions at the University of Notre Dame. I'm going to let Jessica talk more in-depthly about what she does instead of reading through her bio.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But I do want to point out that Jessica has held similar positions to the position she has at Notre Dame at various institutions. She does hold a BA in art history and her library science degree. And I've had the pleasure of working with Jessica while she was at the University of Toledo while in Ohio. Also joining me today is Sean Kennedy, and Sean is an Assistant Professor of Practice Bibliography Collections and Content Strategies Librarian at the University of Akron.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Although, Sean will soon in a few weeks be moving over to a Collections Strategist position at Kent State University, pretty much just down the street for Sean. And again, I'm going to let Sean talk about what he does at his institution. And I just-- going through some of Sean's research interests, include library management along with application and industrial organization psychology concepts to librarianship.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: And Sean has a BS in psychology from John Carroll University, which is another Ohio institution, and a master's from Kent State University. So to get us started this morning, I thought we could have each of you, Sean and Jessica, talk about your institution, so kind of a snapshot of what your institution is like, FTE. Focus on that. And then talk about your roles at your libraries and what things you tend to work on if you do anything in addition to collection development.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So let's start with-- we'll start with Jessica. Sorry. [LAUGHS]
JESSICA MORALES: Great. Thanks, Amy. Thanks for the wonderful introduction. So as Amy noted, I'm Jessica. I'm the Director of Collections Strategy and Acquisitions. And I'll start a little bit with what my role looks like. So at the Hesburgh Libraries, I am in charge of strategic collection building for our general collection and my team also supports acquisitions, both for the general collection, as well as special collections, electronic resource management, licensing, as well as scholarly resource assessment.
JESSICA MORALES: And a little bit more about Notre Dame-- so we are an R1 institution, private Catholic institution. Our FTE is around 13,000. And some of our notable research areas that are strategic priorities for us currently really revolve around focusing on human health. So looking at cancer research, big data analysis, and global health, STEM Cell and regenerative medicine.
JESSICA MORALES: We also have a big emphasis on improving the state of environment, so tackling energy challenges as well as sustainability. And then looking at economic issues and looking at solutions either through political policies, social policy, as well as economic policies. Some of our more notable programs reside in our College of Business as well as our law school and our School of architecture and our Department of Political Science.
JESSICA MORALES:
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you, Jessica. Sean?
SEAN KENNEDY: So at the University of Akron is a regional research institution in Ohio, in a very crowded Ohio. So being from a regional public University in Ohio means that we've sort of been having a little bit of enrollment trouble, a bit of budget trouble. The FTE at Akron has been falling for quite some time. We're probably down around 12,000, 13,000 FTE. And I think Akron was somewhere around 30,000 maybe 15 years ago or so-- so quite the fault. But you know, we persist.
SEAN KENNEDY: Our areas of research and focus are really in STEM-- so engineering, polymer science, rubber. So Akron's the world capital for rubber. Goodyear's here and all those sort of things. So heavy STEM, heavy research, even though we're shrinking in size. My role here is sort of all of our collections work, so driving our strategy, driving all of our renewals, what we purchase, what we decide not to purchase, collaborating with our subject librarians on those things.
SEAN KENNEDY: I do all of our collections budgeting, and I also help with some larger budgeting in the library, licensing and contracts, acquisitions-- so a lot of that business stuff, making sure that the contracts get signed, making sure that we have the order records and our vendor information updated, making sure the invoice is paid, and the payment makes it to you. And along with that, I'm also taking on a lot of our electronic resources work-- so making sure that our people have access to the content, that our proxy access is working, and all those sorts of things.
SEAN KENNEDY: So a little bit of everything from the decision the business side and the access.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you, Sean. And then one additional perspective that I wanted to point out for all of you is-- we have Jessica here from Notre Dame and Sean at Akron. Akron's an R2, Sean? Or an R3? It's a middle-tier research institution.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So when we're talking about staffing at these institutions around acquisitions and collections, these types of institutions tend to have a little bit more robust staffing levels. Not-- some R2's, public R2's, may be not as well off as others. But I wanted to point out that, at least from OhioLINK's perspective, when-- and Jessica and Sean actually both served on the OhioLINK Resource Committee.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: We're partnering with some other institutions that may have just one person working on collections, and it's maybe 50% of their job, or some very, very small independent private institutions that have a staff of two or three, in which a library director is doing everything that Sean and Jessica described that they do for their institutions on top of other responsibilities. So I think trying to capture that idea of staffing levels at a particular institution is noteworthy when you're trying to work with an institution on offers, so space and grace.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Sometimes when it's 25% of your job for collections, it may take someone a little bit longer to get back to you or to work through and analyze an offer. So just that additional perspective, as well, I think might be helpful for all of you. I'm going to sail into my next question here, and Sean hit on this a little bit. And I'm going to start-- it's a two-parter, and I don't know-- whoever wants to start can go first.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So we've all been reading the news recently, I think we've probably all seen the New York Times article that came out, I think, around the 13th of this month talking about low enrollment just across the board within the United States and for education higher education institutions and anticipating that this is happening because of the pandemic, mostly. Combined with that, though, higher education institutions have been discussing this change in enrollment and the size of enrollment as we move forward and making sure that they're thinking about and planning for that accordingly.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So recently on a list I'm on, someone had posted there's a Brookings Institute report talking about population growth as well as knocking at the college door which has a nifty little tool that you can go to and anticipate what your institutions and your state institutions' enrollment might look like five, 10 years out. So in terms of collection development and funding, can you to both speak to how those items affect how you make decisions?
AMY PAWLOWSKI:
SEAN KENNEDY: Sure. And I could talk about some of the challenges that we're facing, as well. So with our FTE at Akron falling, the university in general has less tuition revenue. So there's been a lot of cuts with staffing and certainly the collections budget, as well. And that just creates direct challenge. One of our other challenges-- and I'm sure there are other schools out here, out there, that are like this-- is that our collections budget is very dependent on a per-credit-hour student fee.
SEAN KENNEDY: And so as enrollment goes down, the University. Has less money to give us. And we're generating less fees money from students that goes to buying collections. So we're sort of getting hit from both sides in that respect. I think one of the things that it's hard for me to deal with as a collections librarian, whether it's working with vendors and working with my administrators, is if the number of seats in the class shrinks from, say, 30 to 25 on average, what can I cancel because of that?
SEAN KENNEDY: I'm not going to say oh, I don't need this resource because there are six less students, on average, in this class. We would need to have a really big drop-off in students or enrollment for that to make a change for me. So if my enrollment is going down, I have less budget. But my needs are roughly staying the same. And that's been something that's been pretty hard to deal with. And I think, in particular, FTE bands for pricing-- which, of course, makes sense if the bands are really big-- they could sometimes be punitive, or they don't help libraries that are struggling.
SEAN KENNEDY: So we've shrank from probably 20,000 six or seven years ago to about 12,000, 13,000. And that's had a big impact to my budget. But if there's an FTE band for pricing that is over 10, over 20 or something, means shrinking from 15,000 to 12,000 students is a big impact. But when I go for pricing, I try to explain-- try to negotiate or try to get pricing that we can actually afford, a heftier FTE band might not have that variance or that detail in it for pricing to come down for us to make a little sense.
SEAN KENNEDY: So there are some interesting challenges in our needs and how those are changing and pricing and trying to figure out what we can afford and what we should still have. So it's a challenge. It's a little complex. It's kind of trying to find that perfect balance.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Jessica?
JESSICA MORALES: Yes. So we are fortunate to not have some of the enrollment issues that Sean faces. But we do see similar challenges. So we are looking at growing other revenue streams and looking at developing more graduate programs. And along with that comes additional resources. We don't have a one-to-one tie with our enrollment to our collections budget. But I will say, for the past several years, our collections budget has been flat.
JESSICA MORALES: And for us, that means a shrinking budget as we see inflation from all other resources. So that is definitely a challenge for us. And then an additional challenge is that we have a heavily endowed budget and primarily in the humanities. So we are restricted to buying particular content with those endowments. So we do continually face that struggle of being able to provide the resources that we need for growing areas, particularly in STEM, with a flat budget.
JESSICA MORALES: And that's really where a kind of tie-in comes in with the enrollment. But also to pick up on what Sean was sharing about thinking about the FTE bands, we find a similar struggle when we are looking at resources that price on R1 status, because although we are an R1 institution, we don't have the resources that a lot of other R1 institutions have. So when we are put into that category, we kind of have a similar struggle in being able to provide access to those types of resources.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you, Jessica. This is a good time to bring in one of the questions that I've got in the chat, which is, are there specific purchase models that you prefer? So if you were getting an offer from a vendor, what kind of raises your eyebrows? What kind of makes you think, OK, this is something I think we can work with?
JESSICA MORALES: I'll go ahead and start with this. There's not really kind one model that I'm like, oh, this is the golden model, and this is what we want for everything it's really dependent. So I really looked for alignment with our strategic goals and what we were trying to achieve and also the budget that's available. So there might be a model that's like EBA that makes sense for us if our budget is minimal. We do have some resources that we know are highly used, so thinking about university press content across like all of the disciplines.
JESSICA MORALES: Those are resources where we want to own everything and look for front-list approval plans and things of that nature. So there's not really one model that fits all. It's really about that kind of dialogue and discussion and finding out what models are available that help us meet our goals.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, I agree. I don't have much more to add. That was a good answer. I think flexibility is-- doesn't really matter what kind of deal it is. We're looking for flexibility, especially at a public school where our budget may not be-- it's not guaranteed. It might be changing. We may have literal law that says what we can spend and how much we can-- things we can do.
SEAN KENNEDY: We definitely need flexibility. I would love to sign a three-year deal and get a good rate. But I might literally not be able to commit to three years from now-- those sort of things. So trying to figure out which model works in which scenario and then also just flexibility overall, I think, is really key for us.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Great. Thank you, Sean. Flexibility was the word that came to my mind. From the OhioLINK's perspective, it's understanding that we're a consortium of a broad spectrum of institutions. I have very small athenaeums participating all the way up to the Ohio State University. So when a vendor comes with an offer, if it's not a flexible offer or an offer in which they're willing to discuss how to make it work-- we call it the art of the possible at OhioLINK-- then there's not much space for us to figure something out.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So just knowing on the front end that a vendor is willing to have a discussion about how something might change or look price-wise is always a good thing. Can you talk about, when you're making decisions for purchasing, what type of metrics are you using? Are you looking at strong programs or overall needs for the institution? Can you talk generally about that? And let's start with Jessica?
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah. So this is an interesting question, because we do it in a multitude of ways. And I'll just share a little more context so you understand. So my role and my department, we really look at some of our essential content and highly interdisciplinary content. So we a lot with the big publishers within my program. And we have other more niche products handled by our subject librarians.
JESSICA MORALES: So there's kind of a collection assessment and evaluation happening at the top level, and then there's also individual assessment happening at the subject librarian level. So of course we do look at programs and look at what we already have in our collections and how new resources will support either emerging areas or already well-established areas. Of course, we look at a lot of counter data.
JESSICA MORALES: We look at turnaways. We look at use. We also do sometimes look at Google Analytics, as well, to understand where our users are coming from and looking at our products from that perspective, as well. We look a lot at overlap of content and identifying what's unique in resources. And then we also do bring in a qualitative aspect.
JESSICA MORALES: We want to hear from our faculty members and really understand how a resource will impact to their research and teaching. And I found that to be so helpful, because sometimes we get a response of, oh, I really only needed this for this one project. And we can understand how to better support their needs once we know about their needs more. I'm trying to-- we're definitely always looking at data and really try to make every decision as a data-informed decision.
JESSICA MORALES: And it's-- I think the more we talk about this, I can think of, oh, yeah, we think of-- we look at this or look at that, as well. So--
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Sean?
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah. Yes, everything Jessica said. It's a really good answer. Yeah, for us, a lot of the times that I'm trying to frame and think about our resources as learning, teaching, and research. So we want to support students with a sort of more stressed budget. We want to make sure that we're focusing on those resources that directly impact learning, that are integrated into the curriculum.
SEAN KENNEDY: So yes, usage data is really important to us. But knowing that usage data is being driven by a course and being able to point to that course is important. As we try to defend our budget, I've had administrators tell me, I've downloaded articles and never read them, so your cost-per-use number doesn't mean much to me. Or people download articles and don't use them. Or they download the same article several times because they forgot to save it.
SEAN KENNEDY: So being able to combine quantitative data with qualitative data, like Jessica was talking about-- hey, this is being used in this course; this is supporting this lab-- is sort of what we're trying to do, trying to build up more of that usage case. That's-- that is not just usage data-- it's obviously really important-- but trying to tie it to the curriculum and try to tie it to the strategic directions of the university and just understand it in a different way.
SEAN KENNEDY: We may have a journal that's really important that has low usage because there may be five grad students in that program. So 40 uses in the journal might be high in comparison to something else that has 200 that's really underperforming-- so sort of trying to understand the collection in a way that's more than just pulling our counter data and that sort of thing.
JESSICA MORALES: Sean, I did see at one point-- and then I wanted to pick up with Sean-- that I thought was really great and I think that sometimes is missed in the relationship between librarians and publishers that you brought up, is that we are often going back and selling these resources to our administrators and justifying the cost for them, as well. So I think that that's a unique position that we are in as collections librarians that I think sometimes isn't always noted.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: I think that's a really interesting point, Jessica. And I can say, coming from OhioLINK, that is a question that I get consistently, both from collection development librarians as well as our deans and directors that are participating-- the value of what we're doing and how we purchase things. An important point to remember is that the library is not a revenue-generating department on a campus.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So when budget cuts or budget discussions start rolling around, it's kind of really difficult for libraries to-- I shouldn't speak in general, but it can be difficult for library to get their foot in the door in those budget discussions and appropriately and clearly outline the importance of the content that we are providing for our institutions. Just one quick note on the-- how we're looking at data, and I think I could probably talk for two hours about how a consortia might be looking at data little bit differently than an individual institution-- and this is something I'm going to try to point out really quickly, and I'm hoping that it's clear.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: If it's not, feel free to ping me after. We have recently-- we've kind of coined this in the last year and a half, the OhioLINK content sweet spot. And this is because, in a consortial deal, where you're getting a large majority of content from one vendor or even, in some cases, all of the content from one particular vendor, it may be that one single institution does not need access to everything that's sitting in that package.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But as we've been doing some analysis around all of this, especially more recently in the past year, year and a half, what we're seeing is this place that we call the sweet spot, right? So we have a group of titles that the majority of our libraries say, yes, this is absolutely something from this vendor that I need. So that's bucket A. In bucket B, it can be a reasonable amount of libraries feel they need to have it on their campus.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But then we have this bucket C, where there's a group of titles that, over all of our libraries, maybe one or maybe up to four need that particular title. And where we really focus on the value of OhioLINK is by group negotiating, pooling that money that those institutions would pay for that one title or that four title, grouping that all together now gives them access to that one title that they need from that group, but everything else that's kind of sitting in that bucket.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So there's a real value, collectively, when looking at data and trying to get to what does a package look like for large consortia. Now, I should say, there's a caveat here. And we kind of joke in the consortial world that if you know one consortium, you know on consortium. And there are instances in which consortia don't run packages in the same exact way that OhioLINK does. They're passing along-- negotiating and passing along those costs directly to their institution.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So some advice when you're working with consortia is really to talk to them and try to understand how they're working through those types of decisions and what data they're looking at and how those costs are passed along to their members. Does that make sense? I tried to-- great. OK, thank you.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: [LAUGHS] This brings up a question that I wanted to answer from Ann, which is, what is the best way for smaller publishers who may have limited resources and may have less visibility than larger publishers to get the attention of collection development libraries? And I'm going to kick this off by saying, Ann, I would suggest going to consortia, because at a minimum, at least what I do for OhioLINK is, if a vendor comes to me with an offer for a resource, I will immediately pass it off to the Resource Committee and ask if there's interest from a large majority of our institutions.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: And at that point, we'll start talking at the consortium level. If there's not, at a minimum, you're getting visibility to all of those institutions within that consortia with a, hey, what is this, because I do ask them to go look at the resource and let me know. So there is some opportunities there, I think, for smaller publishers in terms of visibility.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: I don't know, Jessica or Sean, do you have any other recommendations?
JESSICA MORALES: I would agree. I love that recommendation. We are unfortunately not in Ohio, so can't belong to OhioLINK. [LAUGHS] But we do belong to NERL. And I think that that's a great way, because we are inundated with information. So sometimes things can go unnoted. I think the other piece of advice I would give, as well, is that it's really individual to the person and kind of what their communication preference is, whether that's email or phone call, and building out that relationship and kind of understanding what the best communication mechanisms are there.
SEAN KENNEDY: I don't have much to add. Perhaps, depending on what your subject is, you may have some luck going directly to a subject librarian. Depending on the school and the budget and the setup, subject librarians may have money to spend on their own in their discipline. So you may have better luck working with someone who's directly focused in your area than me or Jessica, who are getting several emails a day from different publishers and people that want us to buy stuff that we just can't really pay a lot of attention to.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So we've talked-- on this line, we've talked about reactive, being reactive to vendor products. Are there any efforts that you make that are kind of proactive, where you're actually going out and looking for a particular resource? And if you're doing that, how are you poking around and looking? I'm throwing them for a loop.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: We didn't discuss this question. [LAUGHS]
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, It's a combination of trying to just-- so one of the challenges for me with a budget that's decreasing is trying to still learn about new products and understand what's out there and try to just keep that in my mind if I have a need or if I happen to have some budget room to do something. So a lot of it's trying to just stay familiar with what's out there, talking to colleagues. I'll call up someone and say, what do you have on this? Or even just going to their library website and seeing what resources they have maybe on a research guide or something.
SEAN KENNEDY: So it's a little bit of that. And sometimes it's just targeted. When we want to do more in DEI, it's just going on and looking. What sort of DEI products are out there, packages we could buy, things we could subscribe to, and that sort of thing.
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah. I would say I'm similar to Sean. I generally try to keep aware of new products. So I do take some time each month to say, what's new out there? And what could we be getting that we don't have? I do rely heavily on my network of other collection librarians. So I have a strong network of Ohio librarians that I still stay engaged with as well as in the NERL Consortium.
JESSICA MORALES: So we are always kind of sharing this information informally. Library Twitter is a thing. [LAUGHS] And that's always really helpful in getting things on my radar, as well.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So a good question-- and this is a follow up on where we were headed before-- a good question from Ann about budgets-- so the question is, are graduate-level collection budgets kept separate from undergraduate? And then the second part of this is, if so, what is the basis for allocation? So the follow-up might be is there a difference in allocation there? And then there's another-- an example was, is there a budget line different for books and journals?
AMY PAWLOWSKI: And I know those are two different questions. So let's talk, one, about budget collections separate. Undergraduate, graduate-- is that a thing? And then can you talk about separate budget lines when you're purchasing types of content?
JESSICA MORALES: So I can say, for us, that no, that's not a thing. So we don't have separate applications for undergraduate programs versus graduate programs. In terms of looking at monographs and serials, we certainly have budget goals that we try to stay in line with and keeping a certain portion of our budget dedicated for serials and reserving a certain portion of our budget for one-time funds.
JESSICA MORALES: And that, of course, is for long-term sustainable planning.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yep, same experience here-- no difference in undergrad versus grad unless there was a grad-specific program. It may accidentally get its own allocation, but there's no actual break between the two different levels. And same thing with funding-- we have bucket of money that comes to the university, and then we have goals. We're looking at what we spend based on material type and sort of figuring out what the right mix is and trying to stay within it for ourselves.
SEAN KENNEDY: So--
JESSICA MORALES: Amy, I think you're muted.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: [LAUGHS] Sorry, I was trying to be so good. Jessica, a follow-up-- thinking of your flat budget, does that mean you need to cancel resources each year? Or can you manage the challenge in other ways? If cancellations are needed, how do you assess which resources to cancel? This is a really good question.
JESSICA MORALES: So I will say, in my time here, yes, we've had to cancel resources each year. And the way that we've gone through that process is, of course, gathering all the data that we can-- so of course, looking at our usage data, particularly looking at our cost-per-use. We do engage with our faculty members and incorporate them into the decision making process for some of the resources, not for all of the resources. And then, again, looking at comparable products that we might have-- so start some of that mitigation planning, like if we cut this, we have what we believe is a comparable resource available through something else.
JESSICA MORALES: We also do take a look, too, at usage and year of publication. So looking, if we have something available through an aggregator, is it-- will that suffice, as well. So some those are some of the data that we look at to make those decisions.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Sean, your-- oh, that was just for Jessica.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, I don't have much to add. The one thing I would add would be, in my situation, where I actually have a budget cut and then inflation on top of that, is there have been times where it just goes down to who's flexible with me, who's willing to work with me. I might have 10 things on a list, and eight of them need to go. Well, the two things that get kept might be the two vendor reps that responded to me and understood my challenges and were able to work with me in pricing.
SEAN KENNEDY: So it's not best practice, but when you're to the point where everything on your list is a core resource, it's what can we make work and how much can we hold on to. So that's a little bit of it, too.
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah. Sean, you reminded me of all the great flexibility that we saw these past two years with addressing that inflation, where we have many publishers who are willing to work with us, willing to work with us in different ways than we had seen before and help US cap our inflation.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So along those lines, another question from Michael, saying, academic publications at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum-- I am often amazed at the seemingly outlandish prices many, not all, university publishing houses charge for books. Michael, that's because it's expensive to create a small run of titles. As library budgets and storage space shrink, how strongly does price affect your selection of which books to acquire?
AMY PAWLOWSKI:
JESSICA MORALES: So I will address this from my point of view. I'm not typically making single-title selections, so I'm usually looking at purchasing like the output from a publisher. But we do have subject librarians who are looking at those single-title selections. And I will say, to the subject librarians, at least at my institution, that price marker is very, very important.
JESSICA MORALES: And they are definitely considering that.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: No, Sean? Yes? No?
SEAN KENNEDY: No. No, we don't have much monograph budget left. So content we pick up is usually through e-book packages, through OhioLINK, sort of trying to leverage the strength of purchasing wherever it could be. But certainly expensive books, we're going to look at things like cost per circ. Print circulation's down, if your book's more expensive, we're going to think that's a bad purchase overall-- those sort of things.
SEAN KENNEDY: But yeah, it's difficult.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So this is a good segue into are you purchasing? Are you E-preferred? We-- oh, OK. E-preferred, in library land, means that you've made a conscious decision that, if you need to purchase the title, you're going to purchase it in electronic format first, unless there's a particular request. So can you talk about how your purchasing patterns have shifted over the last five years and then, again, more recently, over the pandemic in that kind of idea of are you purchasing print or are you purchasing E?
JESSICA MORALES: So-- Sean, do you want to go first?
SEAN KENNEDY: Sure. So five or six years ago, we still had very healthy approval plans. So we were getting lots of print. And those sort of have had to go away. And we've sort of hit a mix of print and electronic. And we are now fully electronic-preferred. One of the most important factors to us when we're purchasing books is they're probably coming as-- from a request.
SEAN KENNEDY: So one of the things that librarians talk about is just-in-case collections versus just-in-time collections. So just-in-cases-- we're going to collect all these great materials, and they're going to be here when someone needs them. Most of us don't have budgets to do that anymore. So we're fully just-in-time. So if we're buying something, it's in response to a need or a request.
SEAN KENNEDY: And so often that's for a course. So we want to buy an electronic book that has, ideally, unlimited concurrent users so that a whole course can use it and those sort of things. So we've switched to E and definitely looking towards students being able to use it if they're learning from home, or everyone's locked down again, whatever. We need those materials to be accessible-- so lots of students at the same time.
JESSICA MORALES: So we adopted an E-preferred strategy in 2018. And I will share that there was initially some resistance, because we have many faculty members and many subject librarians who love their print. And we have a large print collection. But what the pandemic helped us with is really showcasing the value of our E-preferred strategy and having access to all of those resources. So we see many fewer requests for print books on the single-title purchase level.
JESSICA MORALES: And we-- it sounds like we're in a similar situation otherwise to Sean's institution.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So we have a question here about one-time funding and how has that changed over the pandemic. I'll kick this off here in OhioLINK, because this is something we're working through right now. We were fortunate in Ohio. I was able to lobby and get some funds. It's called GEER funding, so it's from our governor. So it was COVID-based funding to increase collections or access to resources for our institutions, with the understanding that we are mostly remote.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So this was early on in the pandemic that we acquired this funding. The Resource Committee-- working with the Resource Committee-- and this is what's so wonderful about OhioLINK's Resource Committee is that we kind of already had a wish list. I knew what our members were really kind of hoping they could get to at some point. And there were a lot of ideas or thoughts about how we can acquire content that's used more frequently within courses.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: And I think, specifically, videos was really something that was really starting to take off. So we did acquire some one-time money. The package that we purchased, we really focused on some of the content that we would have in perpetuity. So we picked up some e-book packages that we would have access to moving forward. But we did pick up a few subscriptions along the lines of video packages or content really focusing on what can librarians do for faculty members to help alleviate the challenge of moving quickly to a remote atmosphere.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So that is what happened at the OhioLINK levels. Did you see anything like that locally at your institutions, like additional funding that you were able to procure or were kind of passed to you to help alleviate any of those challenges?
JESSICA MORALES: We did not see anything similar to that. I'll just say, for our one-time funding, the way that we think about it within our budget, that's a part of our allocation, thinking about one-time money as well as continuing resources. Pre-pandemic, we did have opportunities to secure additional one-time funding, either through the provost's office or another institute on campus. We saw those freeze during the pandemic, and we haven't seen them return just yet.
JESSICA MORALES: But we are hopeful that they will in the coming years.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, any one-time funding we've had similarly has dried up. I would say we got some leniency on our budget cuts due to COVID and trying to support online learning and stuff. So we didn't actually get money. But hey, I'm not going be able to make this target because I had to pick up these five extra resources to help a lab run or some sort of online teaching that we weren't planning on doing-- so a little bit of flexibility, but not much.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: I'll cap this conversation with-- that content that we procured that's subscription based, right now, we're talking through the challenge of what do we do when that subscription is over, because we don't have-- our members don't have additional dollars to try to put towards keeping it going. So how can we be creative with trying to keep that content? It's-- I always feel for my collection development librarians, because when we talk about either cutting something centrally at the OhioLINK level, or I know that they're making trims locally to make something else happen, is the backlash from faculty-- and they're all trying to do their own thing for their own subject areas and do their own research in their own particular ways.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So I want to tie this back to collection development practices on your campus. And I don't know if I can say this in a question format. But sometimes you will see lesser-used resources picked up because there is a particular program that has a particular specialty in an area. And it may be that resource is not highly used.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But boy, that faculty member is sure bringing in a lot of grant money for the institution. And that does play as a factor when you're doing collection development, correct?
JESSICA MORALES: Oh yeah, absolutely.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yes.
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah, absolutely. And for me, that's where really those qualitative data aspects come in and where, at least for us, our subject librarians are key in helping us understand that information and engaged in like the ongoing research projects and what resources are helping facilitate those.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So this ties into a question from Alex, which is, you spoke of qualitative data regarding use, especially as it pertains to classroom teaching usage. Can you describe a bit more about how you gather this information, any related standards to streamline it, and how this continues to evolve, especially in the pandemic era?
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah. So I mentioned there were subject librarians just a few minutes ago. And we used them to gather a lot of this data. And we used many different methodologies. So sometimes we will hold-- well, I'm sorry. Sometimes we'll-- [LAUGHS] we'll release surveys. We will also hold focus groups, regular communications between faculty members and our subject librarians.
JESSICA MORALES: So there's not one method that we use to gather this information on a continual basis. It kind of determines on the situation that we're trying to address, and then finding the right methodology.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, a similar approach at Akron-- no standard way that we're doing this, just sort of data we like to try to collect locally, try to make sure that it doesn't just live in a librarian's head, whether that be in-- well, this is inside baseball, but maybe it's in an order record. Or maybe it's within my RTP notes because I'm going up for tenure or promotion, and I'm keeping track of the stuff I'm buying and how it's supporting people.
SEAN KENNEDY: So just lots of different ways-- leveraging expertise within the university libraries, people who are embedded or close to faculty in the departments. And of course, like Amy said, you know who your big researchers are. And those are the ones you don't want to make mad, and you want to make sure you're supporting them and all the money they're bringing in for the university.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So let's switch-- let's switch paths here a little bit. We have not talked about open access at all. So I'm going to read a question from the chat to get us going, which is, I would like to ask, outside of wider read-and-publish deals, to what extent does open access and the open access model adopted by a resource affect a purchase decision? Good question.
JESSICA MORALES: I'll start with this one. So we haven't participated in a ton of open access agreements at this point in time. The library has really waited for the university to adopt a policy on open access. And we've taken our lead from the university. And we just haven't made that move yet. But there is growing interest on our campus. So what the library's role at this point in time is to do-- is to examine what options are available.
JESSICA MORALES: We do look at our researcher output with certain publishers to help with strategic planning on what makes sense for us to evaluate-- a read-and-publish agreement or an agreement that provides a discount on EPCs or any flavor of transformative agreement. So we do-- we view our stance as removing barriers for the time when we are ready. And we try to do that in a cost-neutral way to the library, because we do not get any additional funding to support open access.
JESSICA MORALES: So those are kind of our priority areas, in removing barriers and cost-neutral ways.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, similar here-- no surprise. I think another part of your question-- and we have a question about interlibrary loan, which I think I can help with here. If a journal's open access, it depends on the journal and the content. But say if it's open access after six months, and we're making tough cancellation decisions, yeah, we might cancel it and use interlibrary loan to get the 8 to 10 articles that might be needed by faculty who are on the cutting edge for that journal.
SEAN KENNEDY: So it's not the end all, but it's definitely something that we think about if we're going to subscribe to a new journal or for making cancellation decisions. Hey, this only has a three-month embargo. Can we get by doing a little interlibrary loan and sort of hoping that that's good enough. So it does it does play in.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Yeah, I think, expanding on Jessica's comment, what I'm seeing at my Ohio institutions is that my libraries are really waiting for their institution to kind of take the lead on a direction for open access, and for all the points that Jessica mentioned, that's-- my libraries aren't seeing any additional money to try to make some [INAUDIBLE] and go. Perhaps one Ohio institution is thinking about this in those broader terms.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: When you're presented with an open access package, there's always an extra cost component to them, at least thus far, with the exception of the Cambridge deal that we recently signed at the OhioLINK level. And it's really difficult, especially for OhioLINK as a state agency, to try to talk about getting additional funding for access that is going to be open. So it's that, gosh, why aren't you just waiting and using it for free?
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Really, really difficult conversation. The other piece about open access deals in regards to consortial deals is a lot of OA activity is happening in STEM. And when I look at all of my members across Ohio, there's not-- [LAUGHS] I have a handful of institutions that can be quote, unquote, defined as "STEM-heavy" or who could see some advantage out of something like that.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But I have a lot of private institutions and a lot of two-year institutions where that output, in a way, really isn't going to have that large of an effect. Either they don't have faculty publishing in that area, or they really don't have a lot of programs or classes for which that would be advantageous content. So for us at OhioLINK, the Cambridge OA deal gave us an opportunity to step into OA because they have a broad spectrum of titles, right?
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So they have [INAUDIBLE] in the humanities all the way up to STM. So that was a reasonable place for us to start and think about those things. Second to that is when an institution is presented with an open access offer, those smaller institutions, those independents, will not have a beat on what their faculty is publishing. They just don't have offices that are tracking that, because they're not a research-intensive institution.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So it hasn't been a thing for them to worry about or think about in the past. So Sean, do you remember-- and Jessica, I can't remember if you were still with us at this point. I remember asking in our resource committee meeting at one point, how many institutions are tracking faculty output? And there weren't many hands. So when you start talking about OA, there's a lot of mechanisms that need to be in place on campus for a library to define or to accept it as something that can work logistically but also measure and make sure that it's bringing value to the institution.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So I want to go back. One more point about providing data for institutions, which is great-- yes, anything that vendors can provide to help us make decisions is wonderful. However, please do not be offended when we come back and ask you to verify. So when we get data from a vendor, Joanna and I have the saying trust but verify. This is wonderful.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you for sending this. I'm going to trust this, but I'm going to verify. And more often than not, we do find some inconsistencies. And that's basically because I know a lot of you have access to pull data in a lot of different ways. And it's important for us, when we're looking at a set, to know exactly how you pulled that data and what you're pulling in so we can plan accordingly. So Sean or Jessica, do you anything else?
JESSICA MORALES: No I just want to say, I agree. We appreciate the data. It saves us some legwork in pulling together kind of our own story to tell the administrators. So yeah, I love it.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: OK, great. We have a question about, what can publishers do to help you kind of sell the value of resources to your admins? Are you speaking mostly of journals or books? Our titles are general-- so this person's titles are genuinely mid-price, like under $100. But more broadly speaking, what are things that vendors can provide for you to help you kind of make the case for that content on campus?
AMY PAWLOWSKI:
SEAN KENNEDY: I think that's tough. [SIGHS] I wish we had a good answer. I think especially if it's a bigger product or packages-- someone asked the question if we wanted more general subject areas or more specific subject areas. I think more specific subject areas can be helpful. For example, there's a DEI subset within this e-book package. And I might know that. But if you have data on that, maybe I can pull stats on a specific subset, just ways to understand the content.
SEAN KENNEDY: Then we have a top-level view. But publisher vendor may be able to break it down to be more specific to help me understand the content that's in there. I know that's not a really great answer, but it's a really tough question. I think just partnering with us to understand, especially if it's a bigger aggregator or bigger package.
SEAN KENNEDY: We might not have the thumb on it like you do, but to understand all the little ins and outs and stuff that might be helpful.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: It's good for us to know if somebody else has gone live with the content. As Jessica talked, we have a pretty tight community. So if something new is coming out, and if you know that institution X has been using it for six months or so, more often than not, if we're really interested, we'll reach out to that other institution and ask how it's going, what they think. Trials, in that sense, are really good.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But I want to set some expectations around trials, because staffing levels in libraries have been reducing. A lot of positions aren't getting filled. Acquisitions departments are usually tied to technical services at bigger institutions. We're seeing drop in technical services staffing. So I guess that's a long explanation to say, when you set up a trial, it's great. But it's really hard for librarians to get to and actually go in and evaluate, because there's so much that's kind of been dumped on their plate recently.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So space and grace when you're setting up trial access for content-- and if we ask for it, and we ask for an extension, please be generous.
SEAN KENNEDY: Definitely for practical examples, I think that's a good point, Amy. Such so and so college and their chemistry department is using this thing to do this great thing. Or this is really benefiting them. Or we have books that are being adopted for portable learning maybe with our e-book package. We have some textbooks. Whatever it might be, I think helping us make those connections is this is probably the best thing you can do.
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Are there any types of value-add-- [SIGHS] I'm trying to think of a good way to say this. So value-add pieces-- so we had a question come in like, what's a must-have with a package? And I think, in Ohio, we view those as value-adds. So an example thrown out there was providing mark records. So are there other value-adds that you've seen come through with some other deals that kind of sweeten the pot a little bit or were useful for you?
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Mark records are a big thing for OhioLINK. I can speak to that, specifically. That gives us an opportunity to create records for our members, which decreases work for their technical service departments. I'm not sure how many other consortia are using mark records in that way. I do know there's a lot of institutions that are just taking those mark records and dumping them straight into their system because they don't have staffing or the time to go ahead and add that.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But--
JESSICA MORALES: I would say, for us, this is kind of going a little bit off topic in terms of value-adds, but it's the best that [LAUGHS] I can think of is we're really moving into values-based negotiations. And this is really at the lead of our consortium in NERL. So we're really looking for partnerships that value transparency, meaning that we can talk about the details of our deals in terms of cost and what the process is with other libraries and looking at equity, so eliminating barriers for the cost of publishing; and also sustainability, so just looking at models that are financially sustainable for us.
JESSICA MORALES: So we think in thinking about it as add-ons, kind of these are our add-ons that we are looking for alignment with our values and missions with our external partnerships, including publishers.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So that's-- we have about one minute left, and Jessica, that was a great-- like you read my mind. So it was like what are you looking for in terms of a partnership with a content provider or a vendor? So Sean, do you have anything to add to that?
SEAN KENNEDY: I think licensing that's flexible, that lets us do the things we need to do, like load content into our learning management system, so where our students do their online learning. Allows us to ILL-- we're a public school, so we need to have some public access. We don't really like to subscribe to things that the public can't use. So in terms of the relationship, just listen and try to work with us.
SEAN KENNEDY: Most of the time, we're trying to get the best price on something, but a lot of the times, we're coming from a place of truth, too. I've told a lot of vendors, this is my number. And they've said can't do it. And I said, OK, I'm going to have to cancel. So I think just work with us.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Active involvement, right?
SEAN KENNEDY: Yep.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: It's always nice to see a vendor getting a group of librarians together and just having a discussion about a particular direction. So that-- David, I'm sorry. I went one minute over. You told me 11:58.
DAVID MYERS: That's fine. [LAUGHTER] This was really great. And thanks to everybody who participated in this, and thanks for the great questions that came in. I think this was a very valuable discussion. Also, thanks to our, again, to our education sponsors-- ARPHA, J&J Editorial, OpenAthens, and Silverchair. You will be receiving a post-evaluation email, so please look for that.
DAVID MYERS: We do need the feedback to help us determine topics for future events. And please check out the SSP website for information on upcoming events, that you can see on your screen, including the February 24 webinar, "A Beginner's Guide to Flipping to" OA." Today's discussion was recorded, and everyone will receive a link to the recording when it is posted on SSP website.
DAVID MYERS: This concludes our session for today.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you, everyone.
Segment:0 .
DAVID MYERS: Thank you, and welcome to today's Ask the Experts panel. We are very pleased you can join us today for our discussion on collections development. My name is David Myers, SSP Education Committee Member and Lead Publisher at Wolters Kluwer. Before we get started, I want to thank our 2022 educational sponsors, ARPHA, J&J Editorial, OpenAthens, and Silverchair. We are grateful for their support.
DAVID MYERS: I also have a few housekeeping items to review-- your phones have been muted automatically. Please use the Q&A feature to enter the questions. Do not use the chat. The moderator will be looking at the Q&A panel. Our agenda today is to cover whatever questions you may have for our speakers. So please don't be shy about participating. This one-hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's broadcast.
DAVID MYERS: At the conclusion of today's discussion, you will receive a post-event evaluation via email. We encourage you to provide feedback to help shape future SSP programming. It is now my pleasure to introduce our moderator today, Amy Pawlowski, Executive Director at OhioLINK. Amy has nearly 20 years experience in special, public, and academic libraries and library-related private industry, with expertise in library technology and the e-books, e journals publishing ecosystem.
DAVID MYERS: Working with the library deans and directors on OhioLINK's Library Advisory Council and reporting to the Ohio Department of Higher Education, she's responsible for the organization's vision and directing strategic projects and continues to lead contract negotiations for consortial scholarly electronic resources. And now, I will turn it over to you, Amy.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you so much. And welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Before I get started, I want to introduce our wonderful speakers on the panel today. So with me is Jessica Morales. Jessica is the Director of Collections Strategy and Acquisitions at the University of Notre Dame. I'm going to let Jessica talk more in-depthly about what she does instead of reading through her bio.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But I do want to point out that Jessica has held similar positions to the position she has at Notre Dame at various institutions. She does hold a BA in art history and her library science degree. And I've had the pleasure of working with Jessica while she was at the University of Toledo while in Ohio. Also joining me today is Sean Kennedy, and Sean is an Assistant Professor of Practice Bibliography Collections and Content Strategies Librarian at the University of Akron.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Although, Sean will soon in a few weeks be moving over to a Collections Strategist position at Kent State University, pretty much just down the street for Sean. And again, I'm going to let Sean talk about what he does at his institution. And I just-- going through some of Sean's research interests, include library management along with application and industrial organization psychology concepts to librarianship.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: And Sean has a BS in psychology from John Carroll University, which is another Ohio institution, and a master's from Kent State University. So to get us started this morning, I thought we could have each of you, Sean and Jessica, talk about your institution, so kind of a snapshot of what your institution is like, FTE. Focus on that. And then talk about your roles at your libraries and what things you tend to work on if you do anything in addition to collection development.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So let's start with-- we'll start with Jessica. Sorry. [LAUGHS]
JESSICA MORALES: Great. Thanks, Amy. Thanks for the wonderful introduction. So as Amy noted, I'm Jessica. I'm the Director of Collections Strategy and Acquisitions. And I'll start a little bit with what my role looks like. So at the Hesburgh Libraries, I am in charge of strategic collection building for our general collection and my team also supports acquisitions, both for the general collection, as well as special collections, electronic resource management, licensing, as well as scholarly resource assessment.
JESSICA MORALES: And a little bit more about Notre Dame-- so we are an R1 institution, private Catholic institution. Our FTE is around 13,000. And some of our notable research areas that are strategic priorities for us currently really revolve around focusing on human health. So looking at cancer research, big data analysis, and global health, STEM Cell and regenerative medicine.
JESSICA MORALES: We also have a big emphasis on improving the state of environment, so tackling energy challenges as well as sustainability. And then looking at economic issues and looking at solutions either through political policies, social policy, as well as economic policies. Some of our more notable programs reside in our College of Business as well as our law school and our School of architecture and our Department of Political Science.
JESSICA MORALES:
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you, Jessica. Sean?
SEAN KENNEDY: So at the University of Akron is a regional research institution in Ohio, in a very crowded Ohio. So being from a regional public University in Ohio means that we've sort of been having a little bit of enrollment trouble, a bit of budget trouble. The FTE at Akron has been falling for quite some time. We're probably down around 12,000, 13,000 FTE. And I think Akron was somewhere around 30,000 maybe 15 years ago or so-- so quite the fault. But you know, we persist.
SEAN KENNEDY: Our areas of research and focus are really in STEM-- so engineering, polymer science, rubber. So Akron's the world capital for rubber. Goodyear's here and all those sort of things. So heavy STEM, heavy research, even though we're shrinking in size. My role here is sort of all of our collections work, so driving our strategy, driving all of our renewals, what we purchase, what we decide not to purchase, collaborating with our subject librarians on those things.
SEAN KENNEDY: I do all of our collections budgeting, and I also help with some larger budgeting in the library, licensing and contracts, acquisitions-- so a lot of that business stuff, making sure that the contracts get signed, making sure that we have the order records and our vendor information updated, making sure the invoice is paid, and the payment makes it to you. And along with that, I'm also taking on a lot of our electronic resources work-- so making sure that our people have access to the content, that our proxy access is working, and all those sorts of things.
SEAN KENNEDY: So a little bit of everything from the decision the business side and the access.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you, Sean. And then one additional perspective that I wanted to point out for all of you is-- we have Jessica here from Notre Dame and Sean at Akron. Akron's an R2, Sean? Or an R3? It's a middle-tier research institution.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So when we're talking about staffing at these institutions around acquisitions and collections, these types of institutions tend to have a little bit more robust staffing levels. Not-- some R2's, public R2's, may be not as well off as others. But I wanted to point out that, at least from OhioLINK's perspective, when-- and Jessica and Sean actually both served on the OhioLINK Resource Committee.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: We're partnering with some other institutions that may have just one person working on collections, and it's maybe 50% of their job, or some very, very small independent private institutions that have a staff of two or three, in which a library director is doing everything that Sean and Jessica described that they do for their institutions on top of other responsibilities. So I think trying to capture that idea of staffing levels at a particular institution is noteworthy when you're trying to work with an institution on offers, so space and grace.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Sometimes when it's 25% of your job for collections, it may take someone a little bit longer to get back to you or to work through and analyze an offer. So just that additional perspective, as well, I think might be helpful for all of you. I'm going to sail into my next question here, and Sean hit on this a little bit. And I'm going to start-- it's a two-parter, and I don't know-- whoever wants to start can go first.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So we've all been reading the news recently, I think we've probably all seen the New York Times article that came out, I think, around the 13th of this month talking about low enrollment just across the board within the United States and for education higher education institutions and anticipating that this is happening because of the pandemic, mostly. Combined with that, though, higher education institutions have been discussing this change in enrollment and the size of enrollment as we move forward and making sure that they're thinking about and planning for that accordingly.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So recently on a list I'm on, someone had posted there's a Brookings Institute report talking about population growth as well as knocking at the college door which has a nifty little tool that you can go to and anticipate what your institutions and your state institutions' enrollment might look like five, 10 years out. So in terms of collection development and funding, can you to both speak to how those items affect how you make decisions?
AMY PAWLOWSKI:
SEAN KENNEDY: Sure. And I could talk about some of the challenges that we're facing, as well. So with our FTE at Akron falling, the university in general has less tuition revenue. So there's been a lot of cuts with staffing and certainly the collections budget, as well. And that just creates direct challenge. One of our other challenges-- and I'm sure there are other schools out here, out there, that are like this-- is that our collections budget is very dependent on a per-credit-hour student fee.
SEAN KENNEDY: And so as enrollment goes down, the University. Has less money to give us. And we're generating less fees money from students that goes to buying collections. So we're sort of getting hit from both sides in that respect. I think one of the things that it's hard for me to deal with as a collections librarian, whether it's working with vendors and working with my administrators, is if the number of seats in the class shrinks from, say, 30 to 25 on average, what can I cancel because of that?
SEAN KENNEDY: I'm not going to say oh, I don't need this resource because there are six less students, on average, in this class. We would need to have a really big drop-off in students or enrollment for that to make a change for me. So if my enrollment is going down, I have less budget. But my needs are roughly staying the same. And that's been something that's been pretty hard to deal with. And I think, in particular, FTE bands for pricing-- which, of course, makes sense if the bands are really big-- they could sometimes be punitive, or they don't help libraries that are struggling.
SEAN KENNEDY: So we've shrank from probably 20,000 six or seven years ago to about 12,000, 13,000. And that's had a big impact to my budget. But if there's an FTE band for pricing that is over 10, over 20 or something, means shrinking from 15,000 to 12,000 students is a big impact. But when I go for pricing, I try to explain-- try to negotiate or try to get pricing that we can actually afford, a heftier FTE band might not have that variance or that detail in it for pricing to come down for us to make a little sense.
SEAN KENNEDY: So there are some interesting challenges in our needs and how those are changing and pricing and trying to figure out what we can afford and what we should still have. So it's a challenge. It's a little complex. It's kind of trying to find that perfect balance.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Jessica?
JESSICA MORALES: Yes. So we are fortunate to not have some of the enrollment issues that Sean faces. But we do see similar challenges. So we are looking at growing other revenue streams and looking at developing more graduate programs. And along with that comes additional resources. We don't have a one-to-one tie with our enrollment to our collections budget. But I will say, for the past several years, our collections budget has been flat.
JESSICA MORALES: And for us, that means a shrinking budget as we see inflation from all other resources. So that is definitely a challenge for us. And then an additional challenge is that we have a heavily endowed budget and primarily in the humanities. So we are restricted to buying particular content with those endowments. So we do continually face that struggle of being able to provide the resources that we need for growing areas, particularly in STEM, with a flat budget.
JESSICA MORALES: And that's really where a kind of tie-in comes in with the enrollment. But also to pick up on what Sean was sharing about thinking about the FTE bands, we find a similar struggle when we are looking at resources that price on R1 status, because although we are an R1 institution, we don't have the resources that a lot of other R1 institutions have. So when we are put into that category, we kind of have a similar struggle in being able to provide access to those types of resources.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you, Jessica. This is a good time to bring in one of the questions that I've got in the chat, which is, are there specific purchase models that you prefer? So if you were getting an offer from a vendor, what kind of raises your eyebrows? What kind of makes you think, OK, this is something I think we can work with?
JESSICA MORALES: I'll go ahead and start with this. There's not really kind one model that I'm like, oh, this is the golden model, and this is what we want for everything it's really dependent. So I really looked for alignment with our strategic goals and what we were trying to achieve and also the budget that's available. So there might be a model that's like EBA that makes sense for us if our budget is minimal. We do have some resources that we know are highly used, so thinking about university press content across like all of the disciplines.
JESSICA MORALES: Those are resources where we want to own everything and look for front-list approval plans and things of that nature. So there's not really one model that fits all. It's really about that kind of dialogue and discussion and finding out what models are available that help us meet our goals.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, I agree. I don't have much more to add. That was a good answer. I think flexibility is-- doesn't really matter what kind of deal it is. We're looking for flexibility, especially at a public school where our budget may not be-- it's not guaranteed. It might be changing. We may have literal law that says what we can spend and how much we can-- things we can do.
SEAN KENNEDY: We definitely need flexibility. I would love to sign a three-year deal and get a good rate. But I might literally not be able to commit to three years from now-- those sort of things. So trying to figure out which model works in which scenario and then also just flexibility overall, I think, is really key for us.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Great. Thank you, Sean. Flexibility was the word that came to my mind. From the OhioLINK's perspective, it's understanding that we're a consortium of a broad spectrum of institutions. I have very small athenaeums participating all the way up to the Ohio State University. So when a vendor comes with an offer, if it's not a flexible offer or an offer in which they're willing to discuss how to make it work-- we call it the art of the possible at OhioLINK-- then there's not much space for us to figure something out.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So just knowing on the front end that a vendor is willing to have a discussion about how something might change or look price-wise is always a good thing. Can you talk about, when you're making decisions for purchasing, what type of metrics are you using? Are you looking at strong programs or overall needs for the institution? Can you talk generally about that? And let's start with Jessica?
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah. So this is an interesting question, because we do it in a multitude of ways. And I'll just share a little more context so you understand. So my role and my department, we really look at some of our essential content and highly interdisciplinary content. So we a lot with the big publishers within my program. And we have other more niche products handled by our subject librarians.
JESSICA MORALES: So there's kind of a collection assessment and evaluation happening at the top level, and then there's also individual assessment happening at the subject librarian level. So of course we do look at programs and look at what we already have in our collections and how new resources will support either emerging areas or already well-established areas. Of course, we look at a lot of counter data.
JESSICA MORALES: We look at turnaways. We look at use. We also do sometimes look at Google Analytics, as well, to understand where our users are coming from and looking at our products from that perspective, as well. We look a lot at overlap of content and identifying what's unique in resources. And then we also do bring in a qualitative aspect.
JESSICA MORALES: We want to hear from our faculty members and really understand how a resource will impact to their research and teaching. And I found that to be so helpful, because sometimes we get a response of, oh, I really only needed this for this one project. And we can understand how to better support their needs once we know about their needs more. I'm trying to-- we're definitely always looking at data and really try to make every decision as a data-informed decision.
JESSICA MORALES: And it's-- I think the more we talk about this, I can think of, oh, yeah, we think of-- we look at this or look at that, as well. So--
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Sean?
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah. Yes, everything Jessica said. It's a really good answer. Yeah, for us, a lot of the times that I'm trying to frame and think about our resources as learning, teaching, and research. So we want to support students with a sort of more stressed budget. We want to make sure that we're focusing on those resources that directly impact learning, that are integrated into the curriculum.
SEAN KENNEDY: So yes, usage data is really important to us. But knowing that usage data is being driven by a course and being able to point to that course is important. As we try to defend our budget, I've had administrators tell me, I've downloaded articles and never read them, so your cost-per-use number doesn't mean much to me. Or people download articles and don't use them. Or they download the same article several times because they forgot to save it.
SEAN KENNEDY: So being able to combine quantitative data with qualitative data, like Jessica was talking about-- hey, this is being used in this course; this is supporting this lab-- is sort of what we're trying to do, trying to build up more of that usage case. That's-- that is not just usage data-- it's obviously really important-- but trying to tie it to the curriculum and try to tie it to the strategic directions of the university and just understand it in a different way.
SEAN KENNEDY: We may have a journal that's really important that has low usage because there may be five grad students in that program. So 40 uses in the journal might be high in comparison to something else that has 200 that's really underperforming-- so sort of trying to understand the collection in a way that's more than just pulling our counter data and that sort of thing.
JESSICA MORALES: Sean, I did see at one point-- and then I wanted to pick up with Sean-- that I thought was really great and I think that sometimes is missed in the relationship between librarians and publishers that you brought up, is that we are often going back and selling these resources to our administrators and justifying the cost for them, as well. So I think that that's a unique position that we are in as collections librarians that I think sometimes isn't always noted.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: I think that's a really interesting point, Jessica. And I can say, coming from OhioLINK, that is a question that I get consistently, both from collection development librarians as well as our deans and directors that are participating-- the value of what we're doing and how we purchase things. An important point to remember is that the library is not a revenue-generating department on a campus.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So when budget cuts or budget discussions start rolling around, it's kind of really difficult for libraries to-- I shouldn't speak in general, but it can be difficult for library to get their foot in the door in those budget discussions and appropriately and clearly outline the importance of the content that we are providing for our institutions. Just one quick note on the-- how we're looking at data, and I think I could probably talk for two hours about how a consortia might be looking at data little bit differently than an individual institution-- and this is something I'm going to try to point out really quickly, and I'm hoping that it's clear.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: If it's not, feel free to ping me after. We have recently-- we've kind of coined this in the last year and a half, the OhioLINK content sweet spot. And this is because, in a consortial deal, where you're getting a large majority of content from one vendor or even, in some cases, all of the content from one particular vendor, it may be that one single institution does not need access to everything that's sitting in that package.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But as we've been doing some analysis around all of this, especially more recently in the past year, year and a half, what we're seeing is this place that we call the sweet spot, right? So we have a group of titles that the majority of our libraries say, yes, this is absolutely something from this vendor that I need. So that's bucket A. In bucket B, it can be a reasonable amount of libraries feel they need to have it on their campus.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But then we have this bucket C, where there's a group of titles that, over all of our libraries, maybe one or maybe up to four need that particular title. And where we really focus on the value of OhioLINK is by group negotiating, pooling that money that those institutions would pay for that one title or that four title, grouping that all together now gives them access to that one title that they need from that group, but everything else that's kind of sitting in that bucket.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So there's a real value, collectively, when looking at data and trying to get to what does a package look like for large consortia. Now, I should say, there's a caveat here. And we kind of joke in the consortial world that if you know one consortium, you know on consortium. And there are instances in which consortia don't run packages in the same exact way that OhioLINK does. They're passing along-- negotiating and passing along those costs directly to their institution.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So some advice when you're working with consortia is really to talk to them and try to understand how they're working through those types of decisions and what data they're looking at and how those costs are passed along to their members. Does that make sense? I tried to-- great. OK, thank you.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: [LAUGHS] This brings up a question that I wanted to answer from Ann, which is, what is the best way for smaller publishers who may have limited resources and may have less visibility than larger publishers to get the attention of collection development libraries? And I'm going to kick this off by saying, Ann, I would suggest going to consortia, because at a minimum, at least what I do for OhioLINK is, if a vendor comes to me with an offer for a resource, I will immediately pass it off to the Resource Committee and ask if there's interest from a large majority of our institutions.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: And at that point, we'll start talking at the consortium level. If there's not, at a minimum, you're getting visibility to all of those institutions within that consortia with a, hey, what is this, because I do ask them to go look at the resource and let me know. So there is some opportunities there, I think, for smaller publishers in terms of visibility.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: I don't know, Jessica or Sean, do you have any other recommendations?
JESSICA MORALES: I would agree. I love that recommendation. We are unfortunately not in Ohio, so can't belong to OhioLINK. [LAUGHS] But we do belong to NERL. And I think that that's a great way, because we are inundated with information. So sometimes things can go unnoted. I think the other piece of advice I would give, as well, is that it's really individual to the person and kind of what their communication preference is, whether that's email or phone call, and building out that relationship and kind of understanding what the best communication mechanisms are there.
SEAN KENNEDY: I don't have much to add. Perhaps, depending on what your subject is, you may have some luck going directly to a subject librarian. Depending on the school and the budget and the setup, subject librarians may have money to spend on their own in their discipline. So you may have better luck working with someone who's directly focused in your area than me or Jessica, who are getting several emails a day from different publishers and people that want us to buy stuff that we just can't really pay a lot of attention to.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So we've talked-- on this line, we've talked about reactive, being reactive to vendor products. Are there any efforts that you make that are kind of proactive, where you're actually going out and looking for a particular resource? And if you're doing that, how are you poking around and looking? I'm throwing them for a loop.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: We didn't discuss this question. [LAUGHS]
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, It's a combination of trying to just-- so one of the challenges for me with a budget that's decreasing is trying to still learn about new products and understand what's out there and try to just keep that in my mind if I have a need or if I happen to have some budget room to do something. So a lot of it's trying to just stay familiar with what's out there, talking to colleagues. I'll call up someone and say, what do you have on this? Or even just going to their library website and seeing what resources they have maybe on a research guide or something.
SEAN KENNEDY: So it's a little bit of that. And sometimes it's just targeted. When we want to do more in DEI, it's just going on and looking. What sort of DEI products are out there, packages we could buy, things we could subscribe to, and that sort of thing.
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah. I would say I'm similar to Sean. I generally try to keep aware of new products. So I do take some time each month to say, what's new out there? And what could we be getting that we don't have? I do rely heavily on my network of other collection librarians. So I have a strong network of Ohio librarians that I still stay engaged with as well as in the NERL Consortium.
JESSICA MORALES: So we are always kind of sharing this information informally. Library Twitter is a thing. [LAUGHS] And that's always really helpful in getting things on my radar, as well.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So a good question-- and this is a follow up on where we were headed before-- a good question from Ann about budgets-- so the question is, are graduate-level collection budgets kept separate from undergraduate? And then the second part of this is, if so, what is the basis for allocation? So the follow-up might be is there a difference in allocation there? And then there's another-- an example was, is there a budget line different for books and journals?
AMY PAWLOWSKI: And I know those are two different questions. So let's talk, one, about budget collections separate. Undergraduate, graduate-- is that a thing? And then can you talk about separate budget lines when you're purchasing types of content?
JESSICA MORALES: So I can say, for us, that no, that's not a thing. So we don't have separate applications for undergraduate programs versus graduate programs. In terms of looking at monographs and serials, we certainly have budget goals that we try to stay in line with and keeping a certain portion of our budget dedicated for serials and reserving a certain portion of our budget for one-time funds.
JESSICA MORALES: And that, of course, is for long-term sustainable planning.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yep, same experience here-- no difference in undergrad versus grad unless there was a grad-specific program. It may accidentally get its own allocation, but there's no actual break between the two different levels. And same thing with funding-- we have bucket of money that comes to the university, and then we have goals. We're looking at what we spend based on material type and sort of figuring out what the right mix is and trying to stay within it for ourselves.
SEAN KENNEDY: So--
JESSICA MORALES: Amy, I think you're muted.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: [LAUGHS] Sorry, I was trying to be so good. Jessica, a follow-up-- thinking of your flat budget, does that mean you need to cancel resources each year? Or can you manage the challenge in other ways? If cancellations are needed, how do you assess which resources to cancel? This is a really good question.
JESSICA MORALES: So I will say, in my time here, yes, we've had to cancel resources each year. And the way that we've gone through that process is, of course, gathering all the data that we can-- so of course, looking at our usage data, particularly looking at our cost-per-use. We do engage with our faculty members and incorporate them into the decision making process for some of the resources, not for all of the resources. And then, again, looking at comparable products that we might have-- so start some of that mitigation planning, like if we cut this, we have what we believe is a comparable resource available through something else.
JESSICA MORALES: We also do take a look, too, at usage and year of publication. So looking, if we have something available through an aggregator, is it-- will that suffice, as well. So some those are some of the data that we look at to make those decisions.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Sean, your-- oh, that was just for Jessica.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, I don't have much to add. The one thing I would add would be, in my situation, where I actually have a budget cut and then inflation on top of that, is there have been times where it just goes down to who's flexible with me, who's willing to work with me. I might have 10 things on a list, and eight of them need to go. Well, the two things that get kept might be the two vendor reps that responded to me and understood my challenges and were able to work with me in pricing.
SEAN KENNEDY: So it's not best practice, but when you're to the point where everything on your list is a core resource, it's what can we make work and how much can we hold on to. So that's a little bit of it, too.
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah. Sean, you reminded me of all the great flexibility that we saw these past two years with addressing that inflation, where we have many publishers who are willing to work with us, willing to work with us in different ways than we had seen before and help US cap our inflation.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So along those lines, another question from Michael, saying, academic publications at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum-- I am often amazed at the seemingly outlandish prices many, not all, university publishing houses charge for books. Michael, that's because it's expensive to create a small run of titles. As library budgets and storage space shrink, how strongly does price affect your selection of which books to acquire?
AMY PAWLOWSKI:
JESSICA MORALES: So I will address this from my point of view. I'm not typically making single-title selections, so I'm usually looking at purchasing like the output from a publisher. But we do have subject librarians who are looking at those single-title selections. And I will say, to the subject librarians, at least at my institution, that price marker is very, very important.
JESSICA MORALES: And they are definitely considering that.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: No, Sean? Yes? No?
SEAN KENNEDY: No. No, we don't have much monograph budget left. So content we pick up is usually through e-book packages, through OhioLINK, sort of trying to leverage the strength of purchasing wherever it could be. But certainly expensive books, we're going to look at things like cost per circ. Print circulation's down, if your book's more expensive, we're going to think that's a bad purchase overall-- those sort of things.
SEAN KENNEDY: But yeah, it's difficult.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So this is a good segue into are you purchasing? Are you E-preferred? We-- oh, OK. E-preferred, in library land, means that you've made a conscious decision that, if you need to purchase the title, you're going to purchase it in electronic format first, unless there's a particular request. So can you talk about how your purchasing patterns have shifted over the last five years and then, again, more recently, over the pandemic in that kind of idea of are you purchasing print or are you purchasing E?
JESSICA MORALES: So-- Sean, do you want to go first?
SEAN KENNEDY: Sure. So five or six years ago, we still had very healthy approval plans. So we were getting lots of print. And those sort of have had to go away. And we've sort of hit a mix of print and electronic. And we are now fully electronic-preferred. One of the most important factors to us when we're purchasing books is they're probably coming as-- from a request.
SEAN KENNEDY: So one of the things that librarians talk about is just-in-case collections versus just-in-time collections. So just-in-cases-- we're going to collect all these great materials, and they're going to be here when someone needs them. Most of us don't have budgets to do that anymore. So we're fully just-in-time. So if we're buying something, it's in response to a need or a request.
SEAN KENNEDY: And so often that's for a course. So we want to buy an electronic book that has, ideally, unlimited concurrent users so that a whole course can use it and those sort of things. So we've switched to E and definitely looking towards students being able to use it if they're learning from home, or everyone's locked down again, whatever. We need those materials to be accessible-- so lots of students at the same time.
JESSICA MORALES: So we adopted an E-preferred strategy in 2018. And I will share that there was initially some resistance, because we have many faculty members and many subject librarians who love their print. And we have a large print collection. But what the pandemic helped us with is really showcasing the value of our E-preferred strategy and having access to all of those resources. So we see many fewer requests for print books on the single-title purchase level.
JESSICA MORALES: And we-- it sounds like we're in a similar situation otherwise to Sean's institution.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So we have a question here about one-time funding and how has that changed over the pandemic. I'll kick this off here in OhioLINK, because this is something we're working through right now. We were fortunate in Ohio. I was able to lobby and get some funds. It's called GEER funding, so it's from our governor. So it was COVID-based funding to increase collections or access to resources for our institutions, with the understanding that we are mostly remote.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So this was early on in the pandemic that we acquired this funding. The Resource Committee-- working with the Resource Committee-- and this is what's so wonderful about OhioLINK's Resource Committee is that we kind of already had a wish list. I knew what our members were really kind of hoping they could get to at some point. And there were a lot of ideas or thoughts about how we can acquire content that's used more frequently within courses.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: And I think, specifically, videos was really something that was really starting to take off. So we did acquire some one-time money. The package that we purchased, we really focused on some of the content that we would have in perpetuity. So we picked up some e-book packages that we would have access to moving forward. But we did pick up a few subscriptions along the lines of video packages or content really focusing on what can librarians do for faculty members to help alleviate the challenge of moving quickly to a remote atmosphere.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So that is what happened at the OhioLINK levels. Did you see anything like that locally at your institutions, like additional funding that you were able to procure or were kind of passed to you to help alleviate any of those challenges?
JESSICA MORALES: We did not see anything similar to that. I'll just say, for our one-time funding, the way that we think about it within our budget, that's a part of our allocation, thinking about one-time money as well as continuing resources. Pre-pandemic, we did have opportunities to secure additional one-time funding, either through the provost's office or another institute on campus. We saw those freeze during the pandemic, and we haven't seen them return just yet.
JESSICA MORALES: But we are hopeful that they will in the coming years.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, any one-time funding we've had similarly has dried up. I would say we got some leniency on our budget cuts due to COVID and trying to support online learning and stuff. So we didn't actually get money. But hey, I'm not going be able to make this target because I had to pick up these five extra resources to help a lab run or some sort of online teaching that we weren't planning on doing-- so a little bit of flexibility, but not much.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: I'll cap this conversation with-- that content that we procured that's subscription based, right now, we're talking through the challenge of what do we do when that subscription is over, because we don't have-- our members don't have additional dollars to try to put towards keeping it going. So how can we be creative with trying to keep that content? It's-- I always feel for my collection development librarians, because when we talk about either cutting something centrally at the OhioLINK level, or I know that they're making trims locally to make something else happen, is the backlash from faculty-- and they're all trying to do their own thing for their own subject areas and do their own research in their own particular ways.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So I want to tie this back to collection development practices on your campus. And I don't know if I can say this in a question format. But sometimes you will see lesser-used resources picked up because there is a particular program that has a particular specialty in an area. And it may be that resource is not highly used.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But boy, that faculty member is sure bringing in a lot of grant money for the institution. And that does play as a factor when you're doing collection development, correct?
JESSICA MORALES: Oh yeah, absolutely.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yes.
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah, absolutely. And for me, that's where really those qualitative data aspects come in and where, at least for us, our subject librarians are key in helping us understand that information and engaged in like the ongoing research projects and what resources are helping facilitate those.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So this ties into a question from Alex, which is, you spoke of qualitative data regarding use, especially as it pertains to classroom teaching usage. Can you describe a bit more about how you gather this information, any related standards to streamline it, and how this continues to evolve, especially in the pandemic era?
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah. So I mentioned there were subject librarians just a few minutes ago. And we used them to gather a lot of this data. And we used many different methodologies. So sometimes we will hold-- well, I'm sorry. Sometimes we'll-- [LAUGHS] we'll release surveys. We will also hold focus groups, regular communications between faculty members and our subject librarians.
JESSICA MORALES: So there's not one method that we use to gather this information on a continual basis. It kind of determines on the situation that we're trying to address, and then finding the right methodology.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, a similar approach at Akron-- no standard way that we're doing this, just sort of data we like to try to collect locally, try to make sure that it doesn't just live in a librarian's head, whether that be in-- well, this is inside baseball, but maybe it's in an order record. Or maybe it's within my RTP notes because I'm going up for tenure or promotion, and I'm keeping track of the stuff I'm buying and how it's supporting people.
SEAN KENNEDY: So just lots of different ways-- leveraging expertise within the university libraries, people who are embedded or close to faculty in the departments. And of course, like Amy said, you know who your big researchers are. And those are the ones you don't want to make mad, and you want to make sure you're supporting them and all the money they're bringing in for the university.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So let's switch-- let's switch paths here a little bit. We have not talked about open access at all. So I'm going to read a question from the chat to get us going, which is, I would like to ask, outside of wider read-and-publish deals, to what extent does open access and the open access model adopted by a resource affect a purchase decision? Good question.
JESSICA MORALES: I'll start with this one. So we haven't participated in a ton of open access agreements at this point in time. The library has really waited for the university to adopt a policy on open access. And we've taken our lead from the university. And we just haven't made that move yet. But there is growing interest on our campus. So what the library's role at this point in time is to do-- is to examine what options are available.
JESSICA MORALES: We do look at our researcher output with certain publishers to help with strategic planning on what makes sense for us to evaluate-- a read-and-publish agreement or an agreement that provides a discount on EPCs or any flavor of transformative agreement. So we do-- we view our stance as removing barriers for the time when we are ready. And we try to do that in a cost-neutral way to the library, because we do not get any additional funding to support open access.
JESSICA MORALES: So those are kind of our priority areas, in removing barriers and cost-neutral ways.
SEAN KENNEDY: Yeah, similar here-- no surprise. I think another part of your question-- and we have a question about interlibrary loan, which I think I can help with here. If a journal's open access, it depends on the journal and the content. But say if it's open access after six months, and we're making tough cancellation decisions, yeah, we might cancel it and use interlibrary loan to get the 8 to 10 articles that might be needed by faculty who are on the cutting edge for that journal.
SEAN KENNEDY: So it's not the end all, but it's definitely something that we think about if we're going to subscribe to a new journal or for making cancellation decisions. Hey, this only has a three-month embargo. Can we get by doing a little interlibrary loan and sort of hoping that that's good enough. So it does it does play in.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Yeah, I think, expanding on Jessica's comment, what I'm seeing at my Ohio institutions is that my libraries are really waiting for their institution to kind of take the lead on a direction for open access, and for all the points that Jessica mentioned, that's-- my libraries aren't seeing any additional money to try to make some [INAUDIBLE] and go. Perhaps one Ohio institution is thinking about this in those broader terms.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: When you're presented with an open access package, there's always an extra cost component to them, at least thus far, with the exception of the Cambridge deal that we recently signed at the OhioLINK level. And it's really difficult, especially for OhioLINK as a state agency, to try to talk about getting additional funding for access that is going to be open. So it's that, gosh, why aren't you just waiting and using it for free?
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Really, really difficult conversation. The other piece about open access deals in regards to consortial deals is a lot of OA activity is happening in STEM. And when I look at all of my members across Ohio, there's not-- [LAUGHS] I have a handful of institutions that can be quote, unquote, defined as "STEM-heavy" or who could see some advantage out of something like that.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But I have a lot of private institutions and a lot of two-year institutions where that output, in a way, really isn't going to have that large of an effect. Either they don't have faculty publishing in that area, or they really don't have a lot of programs or classes for which that would be advantageous content. So for us at OhioLINK, the Cambridge OA deal gave us an opportunity to step into OA because they have a broad spectrum of titles, right?
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So they have [INAUDIBLE] in the humanities all the way up to STM. So that was a reasonable place for us to start and think about those things. Second to that is when an institution is presented with an open access offer, those smaller institutions, those independents, will not have a beat on what their faculty is publishing. They just don't have offices that are tracking that, because they're not a research-intensive institution.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So it hasn't been a thing for them to worry about or think about in the past. So Sean, do you remember-- and Jessica, I can't remember if you were still with us at this point. I remember asking in our resource committee meeting at one point, how many institutions are tracking faculty output? And there weren't many hands. So when you start talking about OA, there's a lot of mechanisms that need to be in place on campus for a library to define or to accept it as something that can work logistically but also measure and make sure that it's bringing value to the institution.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So I want to go back. One more point about providing data for institutions, which is great-- yes, anything that vendors can provide to help us make decisions is wonderful. However, please do not be offended when we come back and ask you to verify. So when we get data from a vendor, Joanna and I have the saying trust but verify. This is wonderful.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you for sending this. I'm going to trust this, but I'm going to verify. And more often than not, we do find some inconsistencies. And that's basically because I know a lot of you have access to pull data in a lot of different ways. And it's important for us, when we're looking at a set, to know exactly how you pulled that data and what you're pulling in so we can plan accordingly. So Sean or Jessica, do you anything else?
JESSICA MORALES: No I just want to say, I agree. We appreciate the data. It saves us some legwork in pulling together kind of our own story to tell the administrators. So yeah, I love it.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: OK, great. We have a question about, what can publishers do to help you kind of sell the value of resources to your admins? Are you speaking mostly of journals or books? Our titles are general-- so this person's titles are genuinely mid-price, like under $100. But more broadly speaking, what are things that vendors can provide for you to help you kind of make the case for that content on campus?
AMY PAWLOWSKI:
SEAN KENNEDY: I think that's tough. [SIGHS] I wish we had a good answer. I think especially if it's a bigger product or packages-- someone asked the question if we wanted more general subject areas or more specific subject areas. I think more specific subject areas can be helpful. For example, there's a DEI subset within this e-book package. And I might know that. But if you have data on that, maybe I can pull stats on a specific subset, just ways to understand the content.
SEAN KENNEDY: Then we have a top-level view. But publisher vendor may be able to break it down to be more specific to help me understand the content that's in there. I know that's not a really great answer, but it's a really tough question. I think just partnering with us to understand, especially if it's a bigger aggregator or bigger package.
SEAN KENNEDY: We might not have the thumb on it like you do, but to understand all the little ins and outs and stuff that might be helpful.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: It's good for us to know if somebody else has gone live with the content. As Jessica talked, we have a pretty tight community. So if something new is coming out, and if you know that institution X has been using it for six months or so, more often than not, if we're really interested, we'll reach out to that other institution and ask how it's going, what they think. Trials, in that sense, are really good.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But I want to set some expectations around trials, because staffing levels in libraries have been reducing. A lot of positions aren't getting filled. Acquisitions departments are usually tied to technical services at bigger institutions. We're seeing drop in technical services staffing. So I guess that's a long explanation to say, when you set up a trial, it's great. But it's really hard for librarians to get to and actually go in and evaluate, because there's so much that's kind of been dumped on their plate recently.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So space and grace when you're setting up trial access for content-- and if we ask for it, and we ask for an extension, please be generous.
SEAN KENNEDY: Definitely for practical examples, I think that's a good point, Amy. Such so and so college and their chemistry department is using this thing to do this great thing. Or this is really benefiting them. Or we have books that are being adopted for portable learning maybe with our e-book package. We have some textbooks. Whatever it might be, I think helping us make those connections is this is probably the best thing you can do.
JESSICA MORALES: Yeah.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Are there any types of value-add-- [SIGHS] I'm trying to think of a good way to say this. So value-add pieces-- so we had a question come in like, what's a must-have with a package? And I think, in Ohio, we view those as value-adds. So an example thrown out there was providing mark records. So are there other value-adds that you've seen come through with some other deals that kind of sweeten the pot a little bit or were useful for you?
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Mark records are a big thing for OhioLINK. I can speak to that, specifically. That gives us an opportunity to create records for our members, which decreases work for their technical service departments. I'm not sure how many other consortia are using mark records in that way. I do know there's a lot of institutions that are just taking those mark records and dumping them straight into their system because they don't have staffing or the time to go ahead and add that.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: But--
JESSICA MORALES: I would say, for us, this is kind of going a little bit off topic in terms of value-adds, but it's the best that [LAUGHS] I can think of is we're really moving into values-based negotiations. And this is really at the lead of our consortium in NERL. So we're really looking for partnerships that value transparency, meaning that we can talk about the details of our deals in terms of cost and what the process is with other libraries and looking at equity, so eliminating barriers for the cost of publishing; and also sustainability, so just looking at models that are financially sustainable for us.
JESSICA MORALES: So we think in thinking about it as add-ons, kind of these are our add-ons that we are looking for alignment with our values and missions with our external partnerships, including publishers.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: So that's-- we have about one minute left, and Jessica, that was a great-- like you read my mind. So it was like what are you looking for in terms of a partnership with a content provider or a vendor? So Sean, do you have anything to add to that?
SEAN KENNEDY: I think licensing that's flexible, that lets us do the things we need to do, like load content into our learning management system, so where our students do their online learning. Allows us to ILL-- we're a public school, so we need to have some public access. We don't really like to subscribe to things that the public can't use. So in terms of the relationship, just listen and try to work with us.
SEAN KENNEDY: Most of the time, we're trying to get the best price on something, but a lot of the times, we're coming from a place of truth, too. I've told a lot of vendors, this is my number. And they've said can't do it. And I said, OK, I'm going to have to cancel. So I think just work with us.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Active involvement, right?
SEAN KENNEDY: Yep.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: It's always nice to see a vendor getting a group of librarians together and just having a discussion about a particular direction. So that-- David, I'm sorry. I went one minute over. You told me 11:58.
DAVID MYERS: That's fine. [LAUGHTER] This was really great. And thanks to everybody who participated in this, and thanks for the great questions that came in. I think this was a very valuable discussion. Also, thanks to our, again, to our education sponsors-- ARPHA, J&J Editorial, OpenAthens, and Silverchair. You will be receiving a post-evaluation email, so please look for that.
DAVID MYERS: We do need the feedback to help us determine topics for future events. And please check out the SSP website for information on upcoming events, that you can see on your screen, including the February 24 webinar, "A Beginner's Guide to Flipping to" OA." Today's discussion was recorded, and everyone will receive a link to the recording when it is posted on SSP website.
DAVID MYERS: This concludes our session for today.
AMY PAWLOWSKI: Thank you, everyone.
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