Once again, the Charleston Conference did not disappoint.  The theme this year was “The Best of Times…The Worst of Times.”  After reading the first line of the Against the Grain article “eBooks in Academic Health Sciences Libraries” by Elizabeth Lorbeer and Nicole Mitchell, I would have thought for sure “The Worst of Times.”  It said “Many of today’s library users no longer prefer the traditional print textbook.”  Uh, oh.  As a medical book distributor, it might sound like a death sentence, but in reality it is just something we need to accept and adapt to, which is why we partnered with ebrary and continue to redefine our role as not just a distributor of books, but of information, no matter what the format. 

If you don’t already subscribe to Against the Grain, I would highly recommend it. The November issue is focused on trends in health science and biomedical sciences content. There are some great articles in this issue like “Trends in Consumers’ Health Information Needs and Expectations” by Patricia Pinkowski, “eBooks in Health Sciences Circa 2008—What Have We Got for Our Journey Now?” by Meg White, the article mentioned in the first paragraph and “Preparing to Honor the Past in the Future: Collection Development in the History of the Health Sciences.”

We attended a lot of sessions during the conference, but I will only highlight on a few…

The first day of the conference started with Pat Schroeder (President & CEO, Association of American Publishers) discussing “News from the Publishing World.”  The main news of the day was the Google Settlement.  She said it was the most complicated lawsuit she has ever seen.  I can understand why since the authors filed a class action suit and the publishers filed a copyright suit.  It is an incredible project that opens up 7 million books to the public. 

I always look forward to the Health Science Lively Lunch and this year was no different.  The session was titled “eBook Intelligence: the 8^th Annual Health Sciences Lively Lunch.”  As the program abstract states “the session will examine various facets of eBooks and eBook acquisition and collection management specifically for health sciences librarians.  We heard from a publisher (American Psychiatric Publishing), acquisitions librarian (Deborah Ruck), and a Licensing/Contract specialist who is a librarian and attorney (Sandra Wenner). 

Pam Harley from the APP spoke first.  I loved the fact that she commented on why there is a lack of “top tier” titles available as ebooks and/or why the publishers take so long to make them available as ebooks once the print becomes available.  A couple of the reasons I wrote down said 1. that fact is not universally true, 2. the title might be a course adoption title.  That is so true.  As a medical book distributor and reseller to bookstores, we are very familiar with the term “course adoption.”  This is a publisher’s bread and butter.  They have people dedicated to meeting with instructors to try to get them to adopt their title for their course.  If it was available as an ebook right away, why would they need to buy the print?  As Pam matter of factly stated “digital pennies don’t add up to print dollars.” 

Deborah Ruck from MCW was next to speak about ebooks from a collection development standpoint.  She stated that they have 9 collections of ebook and print usage continues to drop.  Her biggest gripe about ebooks is that usage statistics are not uniform.  You can’t use your own system like with print, you have to go into each ebook resource. Maybe with the developments of SUSHI , Deborah won’t have to do that for much longer. 

Sandra Wenner from Rush University spoke about contracting and licensing of ebooks.  The main thing I remember her saying is give yourself enough time to read the contract then reread it and read it again.  Make sure you ask all your questions before you sign the contract and don’t be afraid to ask for changes.  She had a great handout of resources on the subject along with a licensing checklist. 

Someone spoke up at the discussion end of the session and said there is a need for a Books in Print of ebooks.  Wouldn’t that be great?  You don’t really need Books in Print anymore because of the Internet, but I don’t think you could say the same for ebooks.  It would be nice to have a searchable list of all the ebooks available from all the different publishers and aggregators. 

My other favorite session was “Expanding the Ebooks Buying Experience: Approval Plans.”  This is something we want to do with our ebrary titles soon, so I was interested to hear how others are doing with it.  The general consensus was that it was going well.  It was helping them streamline the process for acquisition and availability of ebooks so they could expend money quickly and focus on specific subject areas.  The problems were the platforms, DRM, duplication, scope and MARC records.  They also felt there were not enough relevant titles b/c only single user available, they liked their vendor’s slips, and liked that they could buy title by title instead of collection of ebooks.  Another library made the step because of further mainstreaming and acceptance of ebooks, embedded discovery, return on investment and collecting to own.  A challenge was knowing the availability of both the print and ebook at point of initial decision. 

The vendor for both the universities discussed some considerations.  For example, are you buying on Format (P or E) or both?  Are you focusing on specific subject areas (humanities, science) or other formats such as pictorial works, reference works, collection of essays.  Some issues with the ebook in approval plans is the timing of the P versus E, price of P versus E and how to deliver ebooks: aggregator or publisher direct, one or multiple aggregators. 

These are all things that we will be considering when we start to integrate ebooks into our approval plans.  We will also discuss with each of our approval plan customers how/if they would like to move forward with this. 

As usual, I came back from the conference fired up, energized and ready to report and integrate what I learned.  Then, I opened my inbox and two weeks later, here we are.  I am excited about ebooks and our partnership with ebrary.  I heard a lot of griping about the cost of ebooks and why are they so much more than the print?  The main thing is, it isn’t the print.  You are getting so much more.  I think you have to look at ebooks and pick an aggregator the same way you do your health sciences vendor.  What can they do for me?  We all sell the same thing, but it is our services and what we do with that product that makes us different and better. 

Just wanted to remind everyone that we have started our “November to Remember” sale.  We are offering a 20% discount on all published titles from our stock publishers for the month of November.

Please feel free to contact me to run any reports in certain subject areas or publishers that you might find useful.  Many customers ask me to run reports in certain subject areas to beef up their collection when we run these specials.  Or, I might run a Doody Core Title purchase history report to see if there are some key titles your collection is missing.  If anyone needs me to run any reports, please let me know.  You can e-mail me at ashleyw@mattmccoy.com.  

In addition, I’m leaving Wednesday for the week to attend the Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serials Acquisition.  I look forward to this conference every year to find out the latest industry information on Open Access, ebooks, consortiums, collection development and more.  I’ll make sure to tell everyone what I learned when I return!

If you are attending a MLA regional chapter meeting this fall, please be sure to stop by the Matthews booth.  We have a drawing for free registration to the next year’s regional meeting; we have booth giveaways and upcoming special promotions (hint: November to Remember); and we have information on all our library services including our new ebrary partnership.

The following is a list of the meetings where Matthews is exhibiting and the Territory Manager who will be in attendance:

MLA South Central Chapter Meeting, Dallas TX, October 11-15: Kim Schroeder

Midwest, Troy MI, October 17-20: Leann Carey

Mid-Atlantic, Morgantown WV, October 20-22: Pam Hamer

North Atlantic, Lowell MA, October 20 : Bill Brown, Jerry Houlihan and Ed Newman

Southern Chapter, Birmingham AL, October 28-30: Heidi Currie

Please stop by and see us!!

Suggestions from our customers have resulted in new and improved features on our website. When a customer calls or e-mails with suggestions for simple changes to make their jobs easier, I always think “why didn’t I think of that?” 

Here are some recent changes we implemented due to customer suggestions:

1.  When adding items to your shopping cart, the user now has the option to save the titles to an Excel file.  Customers use this feature to import the ISBN# column to Connexion to search the numbers and download the records.  The records can then be exported to their ILS and then the order can be sent EDI/Edifact.  It is also useful if you need to place your orders through your purchasing department.  You can save items in a Shopping Cart over a period of time, and then when you are ready to order, save to an Excel file and give to purchasing to place your order.

We figured if we are going to add this feature to the shopping cart, we may as well add it to the Bookshelf feature too.  Thanks for the suggestion goes to Julie Christerson from Pacific University.

2.  I was giving a presentation to a library once and was discussing all of our website features.  I told them about our “keyword” search feature which allows you to search for a word or string of words in a book title.  They explained to me that is not a “true” keyword search.  For it to be a true keyword search, you need to be able to search all the fields.  Of course I agreed, and as soon as I got back, I submitted the programming change request.  I am happy to announce that you can now search keyword in title, table of contents, abstract, and subject definition/MeSH heading.  This feature is very helpful when trying to find books on very specific subjects. 

3.  We offer a service where customers will receive an e-mail with a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly list of new books.  The list can be titles in specific areas like consumer health, orthopedics, pediatrics, or everything we receive.  I have a customer at the University of St. Francis in Ft. Wayne, Indiana who thought it would be nice if we could include the hyperlink for the book.  That way, if the e-mail is being forwarded to faculty members, they could click on the link for more information (cover scan, table of contents, abstract, etc.).  I thought it would be difficult to program, but it’s a great idea.  It turned out to be a simple request and was done the next day.  I think many of my customers who receive these e-mails will benefit from the request.  Thanks Lauralee!

4.  At the NCNMLG/MLGSCA joint meeting this past February, a customer asked if we could improve the website by allowing a search for more than one Doody Star Ratings. A user could choose to see all the 4 and 5 star titles, etc.  Previously, you could only search by one star rating at a time.  I am happy to announce that you can now search by multiple star ratings.  Thank you for the suggestion Kathy Stemmer-Frumento. 

If you can search by multiple star ratings, I thought we should do something similar with the Doody Core Title ratings (you need to be signed in and be a DCT subscriber to see this feature).  This improvement was completed and you can now put in the word “orthopedics” in the keyword search, then go down and click 3.0, 2.0-2.9, and a list pulls up of 22 titles.  This is a great feature if you are looking to fill areas of a collection. 

We are also in the process of doing some website changes for our new ebrary ebook titles based on some suggestions from customers.  Those should be completed soon.  Stay tuned…

I could go on and on and have already gone on long enough.  If anyone else has a suggestion on how we could improve something, please let me know!

Welcome to the Matthews Medical Books Library Division Blog! I will be your host. I was inspired to create a blog for our library division after seeing Mark Funk’s blog - the first blog by an MLA president . With the ongoing discussions of Web 2.0, I also thought it was time…

Let me first introduce myself. My name is Ashley White and I am the Manager of Library Services for Matthews Medical Books. I have been with Matthews for 13 years. I worked in our St. Louis office for 5 years before starting my life as a telecommuter. I have been telecommuting from my home in Marion, IN for 8 years now (and I love it). I received my MLIS from Rosary College in River Forest, IL (now Dominican University) and my B.S. from Ball State University. I have two children, Jack (6) and Marley (4) and have been married for 10 years.

This is my first attempt at creating a blog, so please bear with me. I’d like this blog to be a non-invasive way of giving the reader (probably an acquisitions librarian) information that I think is useful or interesting. There are many times that I want to share information with my fellow librarians (and customers) about publishing, or about events occurring in libraries, but a mailing or e-mail blast doesn’t seem appropriate. This is where The White Pages will be helpful.

Some of the topics I will be discussing are ebooks, publishers, collection development tools, technical services, and Going Green. I will also have guest bloggers, some of whom might be librarians, fellow Matthews employees or publishers. We’ll try to keep it interesting.

Please feel free to send me topics you would like to see discussed or if you have any questions. I’d really like to use this blog as a communication tool where we share information in support of librarianship, so don’t be shy.