Collection Strategy at Hesburgh Libraries

By Julia Schneider, Scholarly Resources & Assessment Librarian-Arts, Humanities, & Architecture | Medieval Studies Subject Librarian | Germanic Studies Subject Liaison

Purchasing materials for the Libraries is not a matter of chance. At Hesburgh Libraries, we have an approach to collections that has several practical components and many points at which decisions are made. In the past decade, the Libraries have adopted an e-preferred collection strategy in relevant disciplines, which allows us to maximize both our budget and the content we provide by investing in digital products that will allow Hesburgh Libraries to best support the research of our current students and faculty.

How does this collection strategy work? Before we get into the details of current acquisitions methods, a dip into the recent history of acquiring materials in academic libraries might be helpful.

Historical Strategy

Subject librarians currently continue a practice that has been in place for decades: using a set budget of allocated funds, selecting and purchasing scholarly journals, books, and other relevant resources based on their assigned subjects within their area of expertise. In the past and today, for printed resources, this selection process has involved subscribing to journals; it has also included selecting individual books based on the subject librarian’s expertise as well as curating print approval plans with publishers and other print vendors who would then provide the library with new titles in prescribed subject areas from selected academic publishers. In the past, this ensured that we could maintain as much subject coverage as our budgets allowed in order to meet the needs of our students and faculty as close to their publication date as possible. In the past three decades, however, academic publishing has adapted to the presence of and desire for digital content, bringing us a wider variety of resources that can be accessed from anywhere with a wifi connection.

Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Libraries adapted to technological advances as they became viable and adopted resources in these new, digital formats, incorporating online or e-journals and books in digital format (ebooks) into our resource collections based on subject area relevance and our ability to make them available to our users. By the 2000s, we had begun to license e-journals bundled in package format, subscribing to or purchasing this content outright. We also began efforts at purchasing more ebooks individually while continuing to focus most efforts on print acquisitions, especially in subjects and from publishers in geographical areas where ebooks and online scholarly journals were not broadly available. By 2015, as scholarly publishing continued to grow its ebook production, and, more importantly, our users continued to request materials in digital formats, we sought to increase the allocation of resources into licensing e-journals, ebooks, and full-text databases of primary sources, while continuing to purchase print in areas where digital content is not available, feasible, or desirable. This meant that Hesburgh Libraries’ digital content investment required the implementation of a variety of purchasing strategies in order to increase our coverage and maximize our funding resources.

Current Strategy

Our approach to collection development currently incorporates the acquisition of print and digital content based on a variety of factors, including the professional knowledge of our librarians and significant input from our users, whether via direct requests or usage data. Some major facets of our collection strategy include:

• Print Acquisitions: Hesburgh Libraries continues to acquire print materials. We currently have twenty-four print approval plans and hundreds of subscriptions to print journals and other serial publications. Annually, we purchase thousands of individual print books, apart from those approval plans. Our subject librarians select these print books for our collections to serve the needs of our students and faculty. We also purchase print books and other physical media appropriate to our collections that are recommended by our users. And, in spite of the greater availability of digital content in recent years, some books and journals remain available only in physical format or cannot be licensed digitally for institutional use, so we always acquire those items in print format where available.
• E-journals, e-journal packages, and e-journal backfile/archive purchases: Hesburgh Libraries currently subscribes to hundreds of currently published journals in digital format. We purchase e-journals by individual journal title, but also are able to purchase e-journals in packages bundled according to subject content or publisher. We further expand our e-journal content through the purchase of journal archives or backfiles, which allow us to replicate or expand upon print holdings, often adding content to support newer or emerging academic programs in subject areas where we may not have collected in the past. This grants our users deeper and more complete access to recent as well as previously published e-journal content that they need to complete their research.
• Ebook package purchases: Hesburgh Libraries purchase new and forthcoming publications (frontlists) annually that are important for research and teaching at Notre Dame across many disciplines and from major academic publishers, like the Oxford and Cambridge university presses. In addition, we purchase subject-based ebook packages either directly from publishers or via content aggregators like JStor, ProjectMUSE, and others based on availability and the desirability of their content. This gives our users maximal access to recent scholarly publications in given subject areas while also allowing us to be selective based on the needs of our users. We choose publishers’ and aggregators’ ebook packages based on the relevance of their content to programs of study here at Notre Dame and on the availability of resources we have to make that content available to our users.
• Evidence-Based and Demand-Driven Acquisitions: To maximize our users’ input into this process, we also take advantage of evidence-based acquisitions (EBA) and demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) programs with publishers such as Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Oxford University Press. These EBA and DDA programs vary by aggregator or publisher, but the advantage of each one lies in a purchasing model based on usage statistics, allowing us to provide wider access to materials our users might need with a minimal investment in materials we do not use. For example, EBA and DDA catalog records are loaded into the online catalog at the beginning of our agreement period with a content aggregator. Once a book has been downloaded a prescribed number of times, that triggers a purchase of that title. Ebooks that do not meet this usage threshold during the agreement period are purged from our catalog unpurchased.
• Ebook Backfiles/Archives: In addition to licensing ebook frontlists, based on available resources, we also acquire ebook archives or backfiles, increasing our content coverage as previously published materials become available in digital format, allowing us to fill in gaps in our existing ebook and print collections and provide access to older content digitally. Librarians here at Hesburgh Libraries make decisions about allocating resources to these purchases based on a variety of data, including: information shared by the publisher/aggregator indicating the number of users who have requested use of digital content from the content websites; knowledge of the contours of the disciplines currently taught or researched at Notre Dame; as well as monitoring the evolution of research and learning in those disciplines, both at Notre Dame and more broadly speaking. These and other factors require a solid knowledge of the research habits of university students and faculty as well, determining what types of material our users prefer to have in digital formats. Often we are able to maximize our resource investment by combining a variety of digital products (e.g., e-book frontlists and archives/backfiles) into annual purchases with our vendors in order to gain access to a maximum amount of content at a minimum, discounted price.
• Acquisition of content in multiple formats: In addition to licensing e-books and journal content, we also license digital audio and visual resources, like music and film. We have several platforms like Naxos and Kanopy that allow us to access such content supporting the teaching and research needs of our faculty and students across disciplines.

Hesburgh Libraries’ collection strategy remains rooted in successful methods of acquisition, continually adapting to the expansion of content types in current scholarly research. This focus on digital and print resources helps to ensure good stewardship of the University’s resources so that Notre Dame’s faculty, students, and staff have access to the content needed for teaching and research, whether on or off campus, regardless of format.