Ebooks: In the OPAC or in the Database?
Posted by: Sara Rofofsky Marcus
With the growth of ebooks becoming available, where do you classify these? Whether in keeping statistics, or in providing links to the items, where do you classify ebooks? Some are easier to search in their own interface, and if the patron specifically needs a book that can be accessed from home, it is better to search in the ebook interface. But, does this disservice the patron who wishes to just find information?
April 28th, 2010 at 11:45 am
I am considering buying a package of ebooks for my hospital library and wondered about this very thing. I had been thinking of putting them in the catalog and providing the link in the record and then adding a separate A-Z list in the electronic resources section of our website. The catalog isn't used that much, but the A-Z list of journals is; I imagine the ebooks would function much the same way. I thinking putting it in both places will allow the users to get to it no matter how they are searching.
April 28th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
This remains a major issue for ebooks and is one reason that they have not caught on as well as we all anticipated. To let users know that you have them, we put records into the catalog which link to the book. This leads to use of the ebook if the user is looking for a known title or if they happen to hit it within the subject search paramaters of the catalog (usuall LC or Sears Subject Headings or keywords).
More people would use ebooks if they went into the database interface and searched from there because it indexes everything in every ebook. However, users do not have an incentive to do this, since they rarely know that the ebook database exists and, even if they do, will not reproduce every search in that database.
As a result, ebooks are underutilized. My guess is that this will remain the fact until a much larger proportion of our collections are in ebook form and we develop alternate methods for searching.
April 28th, 2010 at 4:35 pm
Why make this one or the other? it should be and must be in both.