The E-book Acquisitions and Access: Challenges and
Opportunities
காலை வணக்கம்
Liladhar R. Pendse, PhD
Head, International Exchanges
Librarian for Russian, Central Asian and East European Collections
UC Berkeley Library
Lpendse@library.berkeley.edu
+1 510 768 76 10
Some photos of UC Berkeley and Library
A brief history of UC Berkeley and Doe Library
The University of California at Berkeley was
established as the flagship campus of the Campus
in 1868.
The Doe Memorial Library building was
completed in 1911and holds our major portion of
Russian, Central Asian and Eastern European
collections in both Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines.
The other important repository of materials related to Russia and
the Far East are the East Asian and Biosciences libraries.
Currently, there are more than 10 million books in the UC
Berkeley Library. In Doe Library, we have 5,500 current
periodicals titles from all regions of the world.
The Problem/s Statement
• The complexities of acquiring and providing access to the electronic
resources revolve not only around the juridical conditions that are outlined
in the licensing agreements, but also in differing institutional goals. These
goals vary from the provision of an electronic access to the user. That in
turn can be used to enhance the institutional self-image.
• But in any academic setting besides the institutional self-image, various
modalities such as meeting information needs of multiple users, bringing
the library to the homes of its users, allowing users to have access to large
library of information without being burdened with its size dominate the
decision to buy the e-book or the e-book packages.
• As the data on the next slide show-historically the Area Studies collections
are dominated by the print items
• Why?
Because it is practical! Is it or Is it not?
A specific example: Russian language collections
• As of June 1, 2014, we have in our holdings a total of 237,098
monographic titles and 6,867 serial titles in Russian.
The E-books in Russian Language at UC Berkeley.
E-books in other languages
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Digital Olschki
The scholarly publications of Leo S. Olschki are among the most widely held Italian publications in
UC Berkeley's collections. Recently, the Library acquired a digital package which comprises 1286 ebooks published by Olschki between 2000 and 2012, half of which were new to us. These books can
be discovered through Casalini's Torrossa full-text platform, or in OskiCat searching with the phrase
"Olschki e-books."
Olschki's digital collection is cross-disciplinary but is especially strong in all periods of European
history, political science, literature, linguistics, classics, musicology, architecture, environmental
design, art history, religious studies, philosophy, and the history of science. It also includes the
backfiles to six journals:
Archivio storico italiano (1842-2012)
Belfagor (1946-2012)
Inventari dei manoscritti delle biblioteche d'italia (1890-2013)
Lares: rivista quadrimestrale di studi demo-etno-antropologici (1930-2012)
Lettere italiane (1949-2012)
Il pensiero politico: rivista di storia delle idee politiche e sociali (1968-2011)
Along with Editoria Italiana Online (EIO), it is one of the most significant Italian digital resources
available through the Library. A special thanks to the Art History/Classics Library, the Bancroft,
Environmental Design Library, Graduate Services, the Hargrove Music Library, the Italian Studies
Department, Near Eastern Studies Collection, the Robbins Collection, and the AUL for Collections
for their contributions towards this major purchase.
The Other Considerations..
• There are larger questions such as changing in the software platforms
leading to the additional sets of problems such as particular formats being
obsoletes and lack of metadata interoperability, etc.
• The other important considerations include the pricing of journal packages
and the annual pace of increase in subscription prices against the
insignificant increases in the library budgets that are allocated to such
purchases.
• The problems that the e-resources represent in the developing world
scenarios become even more relevant due to the simple infrastructure
problems such as lack of electricity in many parts of the developing world,
and the lack of access to internet.
The Search Interface
The Patron view.
The landing page of the digital library.
Will it be possible to purchase the e-books collaboratively?
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The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries.
Founded in 1949, CRL supports advanced research and teaching in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences by preserving and
making available to scholars the primary source material critical to those disciplines (source: about the CRL).
CRL acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources from a global network
of sources. Most materials acquired are from outside the United States, and many are from five “emerging” regions of the world: Africa,
the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Latin America (source: about CRL).
The other e-books!
Final Thoughts.
• Are e books the natural evolution of the things in the
progression of information organization?
• Or do they represent a sort of a structural crisis?
• Can e books be purchased as a part of cooperative
and collaborative purchase agreements?
• How can a institution leverage e-book pricing?
• Is open access really free?
Thank you! நன்றி!