As part of a review of e-book suppliers, usage data were analysed to determine which of the business models on offer gave best value for money. Two analyses were carried out. The first compared a range of subscription options from a single supplier, and the second compared business models from two different suppliers.

IntroductionWhen an e-book is acquired, it must meet customers' needs, providing not only the content that is wanted, but also making sure that it can be made available where and when it is required, and at a price which provides best value for money. There are many different suppliers in the e-book marketplace, and it can be difficult to determine which can offer both the best value and the best content and service to their users, as well as meeting the terms and conditions for approved suppliers set by the library's parent organisation.This chapter aims to help the library make an informed choice by reviewing some of the issues to be considered when choosing an e-book supplier, including: the different types of suppliers and formats  the content that they can provide  the range of current business models  the issues to consider when reviewing and negotiating licences. SuppliersThere are many different suppliers of e-books to libraries. Some are established players in the library supply chain for printed books, including both major publishers and vendors such as Coutts (MyiLibrary), Dawsons (Dawsonera), and Swets. Others 1-2-2 are established as providers of other types of online content, including aggregators such as EBSCO, who recently acquired the NetLibrary e-book platform. There are also specialist e-book aggregators, such as Bloomsbury, EBL, ebrary, andOverDrive. In addition, there are suppliers which focus on providing e-books to the consumer market, including e-book specialists, online retailers such as Amazon, and high-street booksellers such as W H Smith and Waterstones.As well as having different suppliers, the library and consumer markets also have different supply models. The consumer market is dominated by sales of e-book downloads. Primarily designed for offline mobile use, these are published in various formats suitable either for proprietary e-book readers, such as the Amazon Kindle, or for generic devices such as laptops. Downloads are sold outright for the user to keep, although further use may be controlled by Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. Consumer e-books therefore follow a retail model similar to online music sales and the role of the supplier is essentially limited to the sales transaction.In contrast, the library market focuses more heavily on an online e-book supply model. Instead of buying e-book downloads and then making the files available for users to access offline at any time, the library pays for access to e-books which are hosted on a third-party website. In some cases, the e-books must be accessed fully online at this website, either because the supplier's business model does not allow downloads or offline access, or because the added features of the e-book depend on it being delivered whilst connected to the internet, for example reference books which depend on an online search interface. In other cases the library user may be able to 1-2-3 download the e-book from the website to be read offline, although unlike retail ebooks this is usually a temporary down...

IntroductionIt has always been a challenge to make virtual library collections visible. Options for physical signposts to e-books are limited -users cannot browse the shelves to see what is available, look at a new book display, or discover a book on the reshelving trolley -all of which puts more emphasis on the effectiveness of the library catalogue as a means to highlight the availability of library e-books.However, the cataloguing of e-books presents some significant challenges, and a recent report found that many libraries struggle to catalogue all of their e-book holdings (Research Information Network, 2009).Conversely, the visibility of e-books in the wider world has increased significantly in recent years. The increasing popularity of e-book readers and now the iPad has raised the profile of books in e-formats, and, with their facilities for full text searching, sites such as Amazon and Google Book Search make e-books for consumers easy to find and purchase. For those trying to make library e-books visible however, this creates another challenge. If libraries are to be effective in connecting users with their e-books, they need to consider additional options which could offer more effective and efficient ways to increase the exposure of library e-books, alongside the traditional library catalogue. 3-1-2 E-books on the webStudies show that a decreasing number of library users start their search with the library catalogue, and are instead beginning with Google and other search engines (CIBER, 2008). For users, these offer two major advantages over the library catalogue: they can search in more detail, and they can cover more content. As Anderson (2010) points out, a catalogue listing the contents of a local collection was an acceptable discovery tool in the past, where the average user only had access to whatever was available in the library. But in a world where search engines make it easy to both identify and gain access to full text content outside the library collection, users wish to search beyond the limits of the local catalogue.So if users are not coming directly to the library catalogue, is it possible to make library content discoverable via search engines? In theory, link resolver services or widgets such as LibX can provide links from search engines to library content, so that when a user discovers a book in (for example) Google Scholar they are presented with a link to the library's copy of the e-book. In practice however, discovery of library collections from search engines does not match the standards of accuracy and reliability that would be expected from a library catalogue. The quality of metadata is variable, which affects not only the quality of search results but also the accuracy and reliability of the links. Nevertheless, embedding links to library content into search engines is a useful complement to the catalogue and despite these limitations 3-1-3 represents a good opportunity to increase the visibility of library e-books.In the longer term, is it possible that web search could rep...

On 1 August 2014, LSE Library went live with ExLibris' Alma as our new library management system (LMS), replacing our previous Voyager system. Although the technical implementation of the LMS was a major project, it was only part of a wider 'systems change project', and in many ways it was the most straightforward part of the process. Far more challenging -but equally important to the ultimate success of the project -was managing the other aspects of change associated with the project, including managing business process change and managing our people through change. Managing business process changeThe business case for the new LMS had set out the high-level benefits we were seeking from the system, one of which was to develop and improve our services by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our business processes. In addition, the detailed requirements analysis created as part of the tender process had identified the specific areas where the functionality of our legacy system was no longer sufficient to meet our needs (such as e-resource management) and where the improved capabilities of a new system were necessary to improve our processes.Having selected Alma as the best fit for our requirements, we were confident that its implementation would deliver some beneficial changes. But whilst the new system could give us the capacity to improve our processes, it would not be sufficient to create that change by itself. The very flexibility of Alma meant that design of many of the workflows would be down to us, which gave us the opportunity to improve our process design, but also carried the risk that we could bring inefficient processes with us from our old system. We knew at a general level that some of our existing processes were probably not as efficient as they could be, perhaps because they had originated as complex workarounds shaped by the particular functionality of Voyager, or because they were based on assumptions that had not been re-examined for some time. But we also knew that identifying and changing these processes would be difficult -not because of a particular resistance to change from staff, but simply because our processes had become so familiar that it was difficult to spot exactly where and how they were inefficient.

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