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Center of Attention : Librarians Speak Up: Do your users prefer online books to print?

Librarians Speak Up: "Do your users prefer online books to print?"

Denise Koufogiannakis, Collections and Acquisitions Coordinator, University of Alberta Libraries, Edmonton, Canada

We are in a transitional period where more and more people are learning about, using and demanding access to online books. As we are a large academic research library, print books are still vital to our collection and community of users. However, many students are now telling us they prefer books in an electronic format for certain activities such as searching within the text and quick reference information. Above all, students like e-books due to the convenience of being able to use the books where and when needed.

With many high-use materials such as books in a reserve collection, we see that print and electronic books are being well used by our students and that sometimes both print and electronic versions of a book are needed.

Libraries need to embrace e-books to keep up with changing needs of our users, but we also need to develop flexible collection management strategies meeting our users’ needs, regardless of format.
www.library.ualberta.ca

Bozena Bednarek-Michalska, Deputy Director, Nicolaus Copernicus University Library, Torun, Poland

Online books are becoming more and more popular in Poland. The number of available items increases constantly, thanks to development of digital libraries and digitization of old collections.

In my opinion the increasing popularity of electronic media is mostly due to the facility of access they offer, and e-access may become the major way to reach readers in the near future.

The comfort of reading from a computer screen, however, is a separate issue. It is still obviously less tiring to read a traditional printed book than to stretch one’s neck and irritate one’s eyes for a prolonged time in front of a computer display. New technologies will most likely find a remedy for that within the next few years.

E-books are our future: Everyone understands that, librarians in particular. We are aware there is no other way for libraries and archives than to keep up with new technologies and adapt them to benefit readers.
www.bu.uni.torun.pl/en

Regina Ahremchik, Electronic Resources Department Head, Yakub Kolas Central Scientific Library, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Minsk, Belarus

Requests from our users for online books are increasing and, according to our users’ opinions, the benefits of e-books are obvious. These include unique functionalities (search and navigation tools) which are unavailable and inapplicable to the print version.

Benefits noted by our users also include the availability of content for many people at the same time, as well as availability of content for remote users (researchers or scientists who work all over the country, at their institutes or in their remote labs).

Benefits especially noted by our staff include the long terms of use. For example, popular encyclopedias in print become frayed very soon. In future we’re going to continue our practice of subscribing to e-books and extend the list of subscribed e-books.
www.ac.by/organizations/library.html

Dr. Jagdish Arora, Librarian, IIT Delhi & National Coordinator, INDEST-AICTE Consortium, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India

Having had access to ScienceDirect over the past few years (our license started in 1999), our users started using books on the platform right away. Since the platform facilitates integrated searching on all document types (including full-text journals and books), users started getting chapters from books along with articles from journals. While books give background material on the topic of a search, current journals provide the users with contemporary research on the topic making this an ideal situation for researchers at our institute.

In general, researchers are very happy with online books, considering the fact that online books overcome problems peculiar to print collections. Moreover, searching in online books can be far more comprehensive and extends to full text, unlike searching in an OPAC where only book titles are searchable.

We are indeed happy with our experiment with e-books and would like to go for more such collections. We are keenly watching the growth in this segment of scholarly publishing and are looking forward to newer models of pricing and content for e-books.
www.iitd.ernet.in/library