From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2014 15:18:07 +0000

No, I can’t. We don’t track circulation by type of publisher. My
assessment of the demand pattern for scholarly monographs is based on
subjective impressions of what’s happening in my library and on what I’m
hearing from my colleagues in other libraries, as well as the
well-documented general decline in book circulation among large research
libraries (whose circulating holdings consist significantly of scholarly
monographs).

Anyone who disagrees with my subjective assessement of that pattern should
feel absolutely free to ignore and dismiss it.

Rick

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library, University of Utah
[log in to unmask]



On 6/3/14, 10:59 PM, "LIBLICENSE" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>From: Ari Belenkiy <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2014 22:03:22 -0700
>
>Dear Rick,
>
>Could you please provide a relevant statistics?
>
>Eg, out of 1000 books (or whatever is in your collection) for last 5
>years 100 books were not check out at all, 200 were checked once, etc.
>
>This distribution would be an invaluable resource for a good
>statistical argument.
>
>Ari Belenkiy
>SFU
>Canada
>
>
>On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 9:17 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2014 11:12:32 +0000
>>
>>
>> >Rick, I take your point, but I'm puzzled by your claim that "an awful
>> >lot of these books probably shouldn't be published." Why not?
>>
>> Because in the case of many of these books, virtually no one needs to
>>use
>> them or wants to read them. They are purchased by institutions in the
>> (mistaken) hope that they will prove useful to the scholars or students
>> those institutions serve, but instead they end up sitting on shelves and
>> are never (or virtually never) used. This is not necessarily any
>> reflection on the quality of the scholarship they contain ‹ it¹s a
>> reflection on their relevance, which is, very often, so narrow and
>>limited
>> as to make them effectively useless to anyone except the authors (whose
>> tenure bids they made possible).
>>
>> Please note: I am not saying this is the case for all scholarly
>> monographs, only that it is the case for too many of those that are
>> published and then purchased by libraries.
>>
>> ---
>> Rick Anderson
>> Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
>> Marriott Library, University of Utah
>> [log in to unmask]