Expect at least six times more usage from e-books than the print version: The acquisitions and usage of a large e-book collection at Texas A&M University

CINF 13

Rustin Kimball, rkimball@lib-gw.tamu.edu1, Gary Ives, gives@lib-gw.tamu.edu2, and Kathy M Jackson, kathy-jackson@tamu.edu1. (1) Reference Department, Evans Library, Texas A&M University, 5000 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-5000, (2) Acquisitions Department, Evans Library, Texas A&M University, 5000 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-5000
While the availability of e-books generally is met with great enthusiasm from college students, providing library access to e-books from a variety of vendors (whose platforms often are very different) presents many challenges to libraries. The Texas A&M University Libraries provide access to large NetLibrary and Ebrary collections, both of which include many chemistry related titles. In addition, we purchased the electronic reference books from Wiley and Elsevier a year ago. We also offer Knovel, CHEMnetBase, ENGnetBase, and Safari. Recently, our library placed an order for all of the Springer electronic books as well. Currently, our library offers over 60,000 electronic books. This presentation will discuss the different types of electronic books, and will cover the acquisitions and service issues for each type. We will compare the usage figures for electronic books in chemistry and related sciences -to the circulation figures for print books in those cases in which we have both the electronic and print book. We will discuss the reaction of users to these collections, as well as the methods employed by science librarians to publicize their availability.
 

E-Books for Chemistry Research and Instruction
9:00 AM-11:30 AM, Sunday, August 19, 2007 BCEC -- 251, Oral

Division of Chemical Information

The 234th ACS National Meeting, Boston, MA, August 19-23, 2007