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Ebrary Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA)
Without knowing it, you have been helping us to build our ebook collection. How does it work? Since Fall 2012 a new ebook acquisition scheme has been in place. Thousands of Ebrary ebook records are added to our Library Catalog for discovery. When a title's usage reaches a certain threshold, a purchase will be triggered, and an initially "discovery" title will become part of the Library's collection.
This scheme is called demand-driven as only books that are found to be useful will be paid for. The pool of discovery titles is kept up-to-date by weekly feeds of new titles and periodic removal of older ones. So far, the DDA scheme has led to 800 ebook purchases, and the number is rising day by day.
Our users are smart buyers. A review of purchased titles reveals that all of them fit our teaching and research profile. A great majority of the titles are from reputable publishers such as Wiley, Elsevier, CRC Press, Taylor and Francis and top-notch University Presses. The cumulative usage of these purchased titles is impressive. Over 4,800 user sessions have been tracked with close to 90,000 pages viewed.
Two high-used titles are Kevin Murphy's Machine learning: a probabilistic perspective, with 113 user sessions and 1,673 pages viewed; and Ostrom Lee's Risk assessment book with 2,437 pages viewed in 27 user sessions. This usage data provides clear evidence of the current research interests of our users, and will influence ongoing collection development decisions.
Ebrary DDA is running in parallel with traditional ways of acquiring new books: approval plans, librarian's selections and users' recommendations. The Library will continue to explore other innovative ways to bring content to our users at point of need.
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BrowZine: A Scholarly Journal App
If you are using an iPAD or Android tablet and need to stay on top of your research areas, BrowZine may well be your App of the Year. It consolidates scholarly journals from multiple publishers and platforms into an easily browsable format. Current and back issues of journals back to 2005 can be browsed by subjects and an A–Z title list.
Users can add favorite journals on "My Bookshelf" and save articles for future reading. Article links can also be shared via email and various social media platforms and exported to RefWorks.
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BrowZine supports many thousands of journals directly subscribed from a good range of publishers: Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Cambridge, Oxford, and societies such as AIP, IOP and RSC. The list is expanding. The online guide at http://libguides.ust.hk/browzine will explain how to set up and use BrowZine. It is as easy as 1-2-3!
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