October 14, 2008

Scott Dermont, IA

Question:

Since I am still very new to this, I am not sure where I should post this question. If this isn’t the correct forum, let me know and I’ll change it.

My question is about how to count items purchased by consortia. I have a couple of examples in Iowa that are causing a bit of confusion.

First, we have a consortium of libraries that have bought into the Overdrive audio book service. Each library in the consortium (called WILBOR) pays a set annual fee plus a certain amount per audio book circulation in their library for FY08. There are currently 84 libraries in the consortium and they currently have over 1200 items. The question comes up about how libraries should report this in the annual survey. Should each library in the consortium report all 1200+ items as part of their audio book collection? Since each library has access to all 1200 items, the case made by many is that they should be allowed to do this. The problem is that this can vastly inflate numbers for collection size, and it seems to be a form of double dipping. Many of the libraries in this consortium are tiny and may not even have this many items in their entire library.

The second question regards the use of revolving collections. A group of libraries gets together and pitches in a certain amount of money to pay for a revolving collection. This collection or parts of it, then travels from one library to the next on a regular basis. Should each library in this consortium claim the total collection as theirs? Should they only claim those titles that they actually purchase? I think the problem here is that the money is pooled, so no library can claim a certain number of titles as “theirs.”

I would like to know what other states that have these kinds of consortia do on their surveys. Thanks for your help,

Comment: 

Susan Vittitow, WY

The collection inflation is the reason why we split out electronic audio books from physical audio books in our survey. Although the IMLS will count both as one, we can split it out at the state level to track it more accurately and in a more relevant manner. We have NetLibrary, and each of our 23 county library systems counts the 2,800-or-so titles we had on June 30 once (so 23 x 2,800). It's going to be a huge jump in our official audiobooks collection.

As for double-dipping, it may be, but it's no different than how we've handled databases, where we have 39 licensed databases each counted once by our 23 libraries.  I've not a clue on the revolving collections question.