From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2014 14:05:21 -0400

Thank you, Douglas.

The quality of book publishing would be vastly improved if publishers
had access to this circulation information by title.  I outlined a
program to make this possible a while back.  The post is here:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/07/24/data-mining-the-library/

I am trying now to get support to build this service.  This is not a
small project:  aggregate, real-time, fully anonymized circ data from
all the world's libraries, searchable by library type, institution,
publisher, title, subject category, etc.  In other words, precisely
what you would expect publishers to have, but they don't.

Joe Esposito


On Sun, Jun 8, 2014 at 12:01 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: "Black, Douglas M" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2014 13:12:12 +0000
>
> The Cornell study is fascinating, and while the data conclusions
> undoubtedly resonate across ARLs, the report's caution about applying
> them too broadly is well found.  We've been examining some of the same
> data in similar manner here at Northern Michigan University--a
> mid-size regional university with but a handful of master's
> programs--and the circulation distribution is quite different.  NMU
> has neither Ph.D programs nor the major research initiatives graduate
> faculty would be pursuing.  A very brief initial snapshot of our data:
>
> 1) Our greatest users of print monographs are undergraduates, at 47.7%
> of the total.
>
> 2) The next largest user is a statewide resource-sharing group
> including all library types, at 20.11%.
>
> 3) Faculty usage comes in third, at 14.28% of the total and less than
> a third of undergraduate usage.
>
> 4) Grad students, unsurprisingly with so few in proportion, are at
> 2.6%, less than university staff or local community users.  The latter
> groups are important because of the university's geographic isolation
> and its resulting relationships with the local and regional
> community...and even to the climate, with the long winters up here.
>
> We have a lot of analysis left to do in order to work out more clearly
> the usage patterns and what they might mean.  One of the more
> challenging parts is accurately developing appropriate contexts in
> which to understand the data.  That analysis has to include
> consideration of the institution's mission, characteristics, role(s)
> in the community, and other qualitative factors in addition to the
> disciplinary distinctions Sandy outlines.
>
> Thanks to Joe and Sandy for the link and comments.
>
> Douglas
>
> Douglas Black
> Collection Development Librarian
> Northern Michigan University
> Marquette, MI 49855
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2014 09:46:45 -0500
>
> This is indeed an impressive report, the most detailed and carefully
> constructed such analysis I've ever seen.  It reveals great
> sensitivity to the limitations of any such analysis (read especially
> the section on "complicating factors") and the potential dangers in
> taking a "one size fits all" approach to any possible actions based on
> the analysis.
>
> These are just a few points that struck me:
>
> 1) It does not surprise me at all that graduate students would be the
> greatest users of monographs, faculty somewhat less so, and
> undergraduates the least.   Graduate students are focused on using and
> doing advanced research in their special fields, and spend the
> majority of their time doing so, whereas this is not true for either
> faculty (who have a lot of other responsibilities beyond doing
> research and writing articles or books) and undergraduates.  When I
> was an editor at Princeton University Press in the 1970s, the Press
> pioneered in publishing paperbacks of monographs simultaneously with
> hardbacks called Limited Paperback Editions (LPEs), and these were
> targeted for sale to graduate students, with print runs and prices set
> for this specific market.
>
> 2)  "Make past monograph usage, understood in context, one facet in
> decision making about future CUL acquisitions and investment in the
> collection."  This is one of the report's five recommendations.
> Interestingly, it mimics the practice of decisionmaking within
> university presses, which base publication decisions in part on
> historical sales data for similar monographs published earlier. PUP
> was particularly adept at using such data, with its business
> department preparing annual reports on rates of sale for monographs in
> different disciplines, and subfields, in which the Press published.
> All recommendations from editors about print runs for new titles had
> to cite such data as justification.
>
> 3) These are conclusions the report recommends against drawing:
>
> * High or low circulation rates should not be attributed to a single
> straightforward cause, particularly in light of wide variation in the
> role of print monographs in different disciplines.
>
> * The Library should not adopt specific across-the-board targets for
> the circulation rate of print monographs acquired for the collection.
>
> * The Library should not halt or diminish acquisitions in particular
> non-English languages absent a detailed understanding of language
> distribution among the disciplines and across the broad patron base on
> campus.
>
> And later the report says: "And apart from the issue of publication
> medium, the disciplines are still divided around the relative
> importance they assign to journal and monograph publications; while
> the reliance on journal literature is arguably greater in the sciences
> than in the humanities, here again it is important to keep subtle
> differences among the individual disciplines in mind."
>
> In fact, the differences go beyond just differences between broad
> categories like the sciences and humanities or even between
> disciplines; they also represent differences among subfields within a
> single discipline.  Anyone familiar with Political Science, for
> example, realizes that there is a spectrum of the "relative importance
> they assign to journal and monograph publications" among the four main
> subfields ranging from highest priority on articles for American
> Politics through International Relations and Comparative Politics to
> highest priority on books for Political Theory at the other end.  Any
> conclusions to be drawn about usage of monographs in Political Science
> needs to take these differences into account.
>
> 4) Among the "complicating factors" is this very important one: "For
> these reasons, we have elected to concentrate on lending rather than
> in-library use, even though we realize that this may skew the data,
> especially for collections and call number ranges that include large
> numbers of non- circulating reference materials. We have excluded all
> designated non-circulating items from the circulation analyses in this
> report, although we recognize that some unit libraries do, in fact,
> lend these 'non- circulating' items under certain circumstances. We
> recognize that circulation is an imperfect surrogate for use of items
> in the  collection."  I have always felt that studies focusing just on
> circulation do not fully capture the usage of books in libraries, and
> the Cornell task forces clearly agrees.
>
> At any rate, as Joe suggests, this report offers a much more
> fine-grained analysis than we've seen from others who want to draw
> sweeping conclusions based just on circulation figures for one
> academic library.  This is hardly all good news for university
> presses, of course, which have much to lose from a shift away from
> "just in case" collecting to "just in time" collection development.
>
> Sandy Thatcher