Rebuilding the Plane While Flying: Library/Vendor Strategies for Approval

Plan Revision (in a DDA World)

Charles Hillen, Head of Acquisitions & Serials, Loyola Marymount UniversityGlenn Johnson-Grau, Head of Collection Development, Loyola Marymount University

Joan Thompson, Collection Development Manager, YBP Library Services

About Loyola Marymount University

A mid-sized Master’s L institution located on the West side of Los Angeles.

One of the twenty-eight Jesuit institutions in the U.S.

6100 undergraduates and about 2200 graduate students; the affiliated Loyola Law School is located near downtown Los Angeles.

Collection Development at LMU Liaison model

22 librarians are liaisons/selectors for one or more academic program

Advantages: Large group with diverse knowledge and expertise

CD responsibilities written into job descriptions

Disadvantages: Liaison work not a primary job responsibility

Librarians frequently don’t have much CD experience

Schedules full from primary responsibilities

Maintaining a well-informed and engaged company of liaisons is a continuous challenge.

New Directions New Dean and Head of CD agreed: program needed to

become more intentional and less dependent on faculty involvement

Trials and Lessons Learned: Have liaisons revise and/or create individual departmental

collection development policies

FAIL

Expertise of the liaisons was not uniformly advanced enough

First attempt to involve liaisons in revising our approval profile

Struggled for the same reasons noted with the CD policies

Attempts to provide information to all the liaisons in a large group meeting were also unsuccessful

Putting Peas In Pods

Solution: We needed a forum that met regularly in small groups for training

Raise all the liaisons to a uniform level of expertise

Encourage discussion of concerns about collection development activities

Thus, the Pods:

Four groups of 4-6 liaisons

Organized around broad subjects

Monthly meetings

The Pods have been meeting since the spring of 2011

Basic processes, workflows and technical training

Collection development concepts, goals and foci

Development and/or application of subject expertise

The Approval Plan Profile Created in the mid-1990s

Many minor changes since, but no systematic review

Major flaws with the old plan

Significant areas within classification ranges, particularly in the sciences, were excluded for no discernable reason

Conception and contraception in RG

Innumerable areas were set to receive slips, even in areas of curricular focus and collection strength

Unexpected discoveries in the analysis process

Bioethics in R-class (and elsewhere)

Wait a Sec…What About E-Books?

At about the time that we started this process, we also piloted our first Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) plan

Built upon our ebrary Academic Complete subscription

We had to think long and hard:

Why invest the time in revising our approval profile if we were going to let patrons select materials?

Was an approval plan an anachronism in a DDA world?

Nothing succeeds like excess. – Oscar Wilde

Why Continue Approval and Selection?

Buy it when you can (is e-access guaranteed?) Bob Nardini in “Approval Plans and Patron Selection”

Local expertise matters “Patron-Driven Acquisition and Circulation” by Tyler, et al.

For now, format matters to our patrons; therefore it should matter to us.

Known unknowns and unknown unknowns; burned by aggregator content in early years of full text databases.

There is still a lot we don’t know.

Observe moderation. -- Hesiod

Redefined Goals For liaisons (and faculty):

Reduction in slips and time spent reviewing slips

Invest time now to save time later

For Acquisitions (and Cataloging and Circulation) Reduction of backlogs/Stabilized workflows

Consistent and reliable spending

Reduce process labor

Accelerate receipt of desired material

Receive roughly 70% of our print book purchase on approval and 30% on firm orders Flip the old ratio

Additional Goals Provide a framework for moving the needle from

print purchasing to e-books, both firm and DDA

To feel confident that our approval-to-firm order ratio would be within broad parameters that we had set through our systematic approval plan review

Begin a pilot project for going e-preferred through the approval plan for certain academic disciplines

Getting Started In consultation with our YBP representative, we

outlined a plan for a full revision

Cautionary factors:

Desired granularity of our decision making with the dual challenges --AND

Had to educate each liaison on the process – AND

Had to manage the time constraints of each meeting

YBP’s Role YBP approval profiling and Collection Development

Manager’s role

LMU’s process more involved than typical profiling project More time onsite; more involvement in process

More involvement in decision making

An excellent opportunity to be present while intensive collection development work was being carried out

LMU approval is expanding and becoming comprehensive while the trend is toward contraction and/or shift to DDA

YBP’s Role Adjusted Expectations: more in depth review process,

working with a profile that had not been significantly changed in many years

Unanticipated outcomes: the extent of changes Created new framework of multiple plans

Needed to coordinate profile changes among plans

Scope expanded to include additional needs discovered during the review process

YBP in Partnership Deconstructed the existing profile

Constructed several new profiles that mirror the collection development and access objectives of the library

Found a few limitations

Expanded to full use of the profiling capabilities of YBP

Found it necessary and beneficial to address each level of the profile

The subject review process

Review of certain publisher list rules

Review of series instructions

The process also served as a crash course for the library on YBP’s profiling capabilities and vocabulary

The Review Process Title by title review in GOBI

Viewed title notifications sent and titles shipped

Reviewed title detail in GOBI record

Kept running list of additional needs not met by main profile

Subject liaison as central decision maker Liaisons were in the hot seat but didn’t work alone

YBP role to explain profiling options and expected outcomes

Additional tools Excel : to view title information from GOBI in

aggregate

Classweb, Local catalog, Google Sites

Reflections It was a much more intensive process than most libraries

choose to employ

Worked well for LMU and the outcomes are informative for libraries in general It was beneficial for the library to consider the e-book policy and

print policy simultaneously

While academic output of e-books is somewhere above 40% of print and growing, there are still titles for which there is only a print option

Library needs a policy in place for collecting preferences for e and p

Library must decide between the multiple e-book options

A comprehensive collection development program can and, in this case, should include traditional print approval, e-preferred approval and DDA

The process was very beneficial for YBP as it provided opportunities to test out new approaches and new services

The Results We now have a profile structure that includes several

subject or function specific plans: A main books profile

An “essentials” profile to capture critical titles

A reference plan

A museum publications plan

A novels plan

Plans to support DDA

All of these plans are automatically de-duplicated but must be manually coordinated

Long-standing undesirable parameters were repaired

Found new opportunities to contemporize receipts based on new programs or other curricular developments

More Results So far in fiscal year 2014, we have we have received

fewer books on approval than in either 2011 or 2012

Factors to keep in mind as we begin to fully analyze the impact of our profile changes At the end of both the 2011 and 2012 fiscal years, the

library had to place our approval accounts on hold

YBP continued to allocate materials to our approval plans

When the new fiscal year began we received backlogged titles as well as current allocations

Some areas of our profile were restricted rather than opened

It will take several months for us to fully know the impact of our changes

Next Steps Incorporate reviews of subject areas into the subject

librarians’ performance goals on staggered intervals

Employ the use of online conferencing, video chat or remote desktop technologies to have dynamic and productive meetings with YBP

Establish a routine method for assessing the impact of the changes and ensuring quality control

Already created an assessment tool that asked the subject liaisons to self-identify their skills, abilities and knowledge of all of the concepts and tasks that underpin selection, evaluation, and collection management

Recently created a new DDA profile from the revised print profile

THANK YOU!

Charles Hillen – chillen@lmu.edu

Glenn Johnson-Grau – gjohnson@lmu.edu

Joan Thompson – jthompson@ybp.com

Sources Nardini, B. (2011). Approval Plan and Patron

Selection: Two Infrastructures. In D.A. Swords (Ed.), Patron-Driven Acquisitions: History and Best Practices (23-44). Berlin: De Gruyter Saur.

Tyler, D.C. et al. (2012) Patron-Driven Acquisition and Circulation at an Academic Library: Interaction Effects and Circulation Performance of Print Books Acquired via Librarians’ Orders, Approval Plans, and Patrons’ Interlibrary Loan Requests. Collection Management, 38(1), 3-32. DOI:10.1080/01462679.2012.730494