Related to my interest in finding physical books, as you might guess, is finding electronic ones. And in this area there are several things to consider: organizational practices, user understandings, and usability.
Organizational Practices
How do we think of electronic books? Where are they located in our systems? Do we put them in the catalog so that there is one interface that easily searches all monographs? Do we leave them out and the catalog only represents the physical collection? Do we put them in the eresources area? Do users know it’s eresources or do they assume eresources are all journals? We, of course, have to make decisions based on the limitations of resources available to us, so how do we include usability and user expectations in the process? How do we think about marketing and communication in light of these decisions?
For example, in another ebook issue, as we embrace extremely logical Demand Driven Acquisitions approaches to book buying, something that only really makes sense in an electronic medium, what happens to users’ perceptions of books? One department I worked with in the past was genuinely upset about DDA without knowing DDA was the root of their concern. They told me that our collections had gotten worse and they didn’t know why. They shared that in the past they were able to look up books in the catalog and then stroll over to the library to pick them up. But once we started using DDA they only found ebook records. They didn’t know what DDA was, and I hadn’t known enough about their research processes to know how they would interpret DDA in the corse of their scholarly work. From their point of view, the library all of a sudden had hundreds of ebooks (that we would have never purchased in print due to limited resources). We had many more books to wade through and they had the impression we had fewer paper ones. The collection felt worse to them even though they actually had access to far more information. And that was not on the department. That was on the library. (Specifically, that’s on the communication process, which is hugely systemic. It’s part knowing what research looks like in different disciplines, knowing specific faculty members’ approaches, the mass communication to campus, the individualized liaison approach, etc. We solved this with several individual meetings as well as a departmental meeting with the liaison–yours truly.)
User Understanding
Which leads, cleanly, into what our users understand. The following all color your understanding of the role of ebooks, why the library has them, and how you go about finding them:
- Disciplinary differences in reading
- Disciplinary differences in the need to know the most current research
- The varying platforms ebooks are published in (from the reader friendly Kindle/Nook/iBook formats to the more research focused EBL/ebrary variety)
- Author/publisher processes for determining if something is offered electronically and on what platform
- The owning vs. leasing arrangements that are necessitated in an e-enviornment (rather than the clear cut owning in a physical one)
- The increase of knowledge production that is not matched by an increase in materials budgets (which is related to the DDA discussion)
- The costs of keeping books on the shelf that might never have circulated (and the speculative nature of building a physical collection)
- The varying user expectations that we’re attempting to balance, from print only to electronic only preferences
- That ebooks are in fact books, but they are also electronic resources, and different libraries in different communities might have different approaches for how to make them findable
- That serendipity is a beloved experience by many library users (and librarians!) so though ebooks don’t fit on the shelves with our physical ones, libraries are still working on enabling this type of serendipity
Usability
I think a good place to start when thinking about usability is what is it that we know users want to do that we can examine. Another nice place to start is what do users want to do that we don’t know about–but that’s really more something to tease out in conversations rather than a usability study.
With ebooks, I break it down by campus users (since our community beyond the userID will have to come to campus to be able to use these resources). So I think in terns of (a) researcher/faculty member and (b) assignment/student.
A researcher (hopefully!) starts out understanding the difference between a book and an article. They have a sense of what they can expect in a book, and therefore know that a book is what they’re looking for. So a usability study could include questions about how they would find a book on a given topic, how they would find all the books the library provides on a given subject, and can they find a specific book that exists only in an eformat. Researchers, at least in 2013, have the experience of using physical analogs for the electronic options available to them today, which contextualizes their thinking for the electronic media they come across in the research process. It also creates a structure in which they expect ebooks and e-articles to act like the physical media they shaped their understanding of research around.
Someone working on an assignment will not necessarily understand that a book is different than an article, or if they do grasp that, it’s often unlikely (with undergraduate students) that they can articulate what makes a chapter in a book different from an article. Already, for these users, format can be a confusing aspect of the search. Why would you specifically be looking for a book (or article)? What does it matter if it’s print or electronic? What’s the difference between (whatever you call your) catalog and (whatever you call your) discovery service? Why would you chose one over the other? If I were doing a usability study with students today, I’m certain I would either focus on the core tasks we know are being requested in classes or on specific new services I wanted to be sure our students would know. ebooks may or may not be part of that. But if I wanted to focus on ebooks, I’d probably start with an informational interview teasing out some of the questions above, and then seeing if they could identify known items (as in, the bibliography a professor gives them) and if they know what to do when they come across a record for an electronic book. That’s a low bar, but extremely useful to understand.
So back to the matter at hand: contrasted with the epistemological structures that enable (or disable) finding physical books, finding ebooks is partially rooted in the organization of material by the library, but is also rooted in a user’s understanding of ebooks vs. books as well as the usability of the interfaces we provide. Also worthy of exploration, but a big bigger and more unwieldy of a topic. Whereas the limits and benefits of a linear classification system might be able to be explored primarily with epistemological texts (and supplemented by user studies), clearly ebook require a lot more research with individuals, and the research would need to be duplicated at different libraries as systems are often custom designed for each community.
And all that is found within this post might be moot depending on the next research agenda post… which should be up in about a week.