Noteworthy and newsworthy

Citation

by Eileen Fitzsimons, E. (2007), "Noteworthy and newsworthy", The Bottom Line, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2007.17020bab.001

Noteworthy and newsworthy

This year’s LJ’s annual book-buying survey, which profiles a select group of public libraries (the LJ 100) distributed evenly throughout the country by size and type, revealed an increase in circulation, which has been continuous since a modest dip in the late 1990s. Over half of the libraries surveyed reported increased circulation an impressive increase over 32 percent in 1999. (Last year 55 percent reported an increase.) On average, circulation rose by over 4 percent, the greatest increase since the survey began in 1998.

Librarians are finding that, although the internet takes care of a sizeable amount of patrons’ needs for information, in most cases the web has not caused a decrease in circulation but rather a shift in the type of materials borrowed. In particular, libraries are purchasing more fiction. At one time fiction accounted for approximately one-third of library budgets, but two years ago it rose to half, where it remained this year. Some libraries attribute their increase in circulation to the purchase of more fiction.

More browsing materials have regularly meant higher circulation, and increases in browsing materials are tied to budget increases. This year 44 percent of the libraries responding had increased budgets, and only 10 percent had decreases. This is the best report since 2003-2004, and the increase of nearly 5 percent is the biggest increase the survey has reported since 1999.

Even more effective than the availability of more browsing materials, according to half of the respondents, is the ability to reserve materials from home. Although this is certainly not new, better systems and more effective publicity have made a significant difference in the how much the service is used. E-mailing patrons about reserves or overdue items has also made a difference. Library useres are more likely to respond to an e-mail than to a phone call. Library web sites featuring readers’ advisory, lists of new books, and reviews are considered factors in increased circulation, and downloadable audiobooks are also said to have boosted circulation. Downloadable videos, music CDs, and ebooks may also play a role. Over one-third of this year’s respondents buy ebooks, and although most are in areas in which the information changes rapidly and frequent updates are needed – computer science, business, health/medicine – fiction and e-romances are also popular (nearly half say general fiction is first in ebook circulation).

There have also been some changes in what people are checking out. For example, in 2002, 7 percent of respondents cited current events as a top circulator; this year that grew to 25 percent. History ranked third among top circulators this year. Cookbooks were considered popular circulators among half of the respondents, up from 25 percent in 2002. Religion books are circulating more, and in addition to buying more adult fiction, libraries are acquiring more large print, graphic novels, and Christian fiction. The Library Journal article has more information on what public libraries are buying, statistics and tables, and some interesting observations on using vendors as selectors (Hoffert, 2007).

Latest libraries to join Google digitization project

The University of Texas at Austin is the 11th library and Princeton University the 12th to partner with Google in its digitization project, Google Books Search. The company has a six-year contract with both libraries (American Libraries, 2007).

The UT Libraries have prepared a list of books in the public domain, which may be freely read online, and books still under copyright, for which only index information and “snippets” will be retrievable. Google will digitize “at least one million volumes” from the UT Libraries (Albanese and Oder, 2007).

Google will pay for picking up the books, digitizing them, putting them on the web site and returning them. The library pays the costs associated with selecting the books and bringing them to a central collection point (American Libraries, 2007).

Approximately one million books from Princeton’s library will be digitized as well, but they will all be in the public domain. Private universities are more cautious than public institutions about copyright because they have fewer legal protections (Albanese and Oder, 2007).

The project continues to be controversial. The matter of fair use and other copyright issues are still under debate. There are also the questions of what will happen to these materials should the necessary hardware and software become unavailable, and it has been suggested that one also retain hard copies of important materials.

One of the groups that opposed Google Book Search is the Open Content Alliance (OCA). OCA’s objection is that Google does not want their books to appear in any search engine but their own. OCA is in favor of an alternate endeavor, described on the CNN Web site, involving a grant from the Albert Sloan Foundation to the Internet Archive, which is a member of the alliance. The project will digitize collections from the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The OCA will not digitize any copyrighted materials without receiving explicit permission. Although the Internet Archive will host the digitized titles, the OCA is encouraging other search engines to index the materials (Balas, 2007).

Edited by Eileen FitzsimonsFitzsimons Editorial Consultants, Chicago, Illinois, USA