Re: Data on circulation of books

[Elizabeth Kirk <Elizabeth.E.Kirk@Dartmouth.EDU>]

I've been listening to this conversation with interest. I believe 
that most of the issues that have been mentioned are more nuanced 
than we've read so far and, without recognizing that, it would be 
extremely easy to gain the completely wrong impression.

First, there is a great difference between use of monographs (and 
serials, for that matter) and circulation statistics. There are a 
good number of disciplines, generally in the Humanities, where 
in- house use of monographs is at least as significant as 
circulation. It's common to walk down by stack-level carrels in 
most research libraries and see people working with a pile of 
books, none of which is going to be checked out. Since these same 
disciplines are often the lead producers of scholarly monographs 
(I think especially of my own scholarly background, French 
literature), it's not a case of libraries and publishers not 
knowing when to say "no". It's a case of one statistical measure 
not demonstrating its theoretical value. The fact that such a 
large percentage of books in a library never circulate doesn't 
mean that this same percentage is never used, and academic 
librarians know this. Our problem is that we have not found a 
good way to measure in-house use--simple solutions like counting 
books left on tables and/or photocopiers haven't been found to be 
terribly accurate.

I think that the "holy grail" as it were of monographic use 
statistics is something that we hope e-books will provide. We'll 
know each time a book is opened. It sounds good, anyway, if we 
can work with aggregators and publishers to find a portal for 
these resources that doesn't frustrate users with single-user 
check-outs and/or client software. Users will expect that access 
should work as well for books as it does for articles.

The difference between "availability" and "ease of access" is, 
conversely, apparent to anyone who spent significant time in a 
reference room in the early 1990s and either overheard or was the 
reference librarian explaining to the freshman that Lexis-Nexis 
was not the best source for a paper on the condition of peasants 
in Eastern Europe from 1918 to 1945 (disclosure: I was that 
librarian), and that was why he was not finding any articles. The 
freshman was equally sure that he would, because it was "easier" 
to sit in mounting frustration and poke through the only 
full-text database available than it would be to use a print 
index and then go retrieve articles in bound volumes of journal 
backfiles. Online but not appropriate for that particular use 
seemed easier. This sounds even more familiar now.

It should also be remembered that intellectual access to books 
via traditional library catalogs--online as well as cards--is not 
as deep as access to the article literature--subject headings are 
so broad that they don't tell the story. Full-text searching of 
books should eventually change that, once these become more in 
the forefront of users' routines. This underlines Joe's theorem 
that findable and available are two different animals. It also 
gives some legitimacy to the "tear down the walls" school of 
thought.

When I was a graduate student back in the hoary old days before 
Google or even the Web (yes, and they had electricity then, can 
you believe it?), our professors would often moan that we never 
bothered reading scholarly journals and depended almost entirely 
on books. It would be interesting to see how the increasing 
ubiquity of article- length work online may shift the brunt of 
Humanities work toward that form, and how that might impact the 
use of books, in or out of the library. And how the balance might 
be found once online books are as routine a part of scholars' 
background work as online articles have become.

For now, statistics can lead us astray.

Best,
Eliz


Elizabeth E. Kirk
Associate Librarian for Information Resources
Dartmouth College Library
6025 Baker-Berry Library, Rm. 115
Hanover, NH 03755-3525
telephone: (603) 646-9929
fax: (603) 646-3702
Elizabeth.E.Kirk@dartmouth.edu