The Impact of Consortial Purchasing on Library Acquisitions: the Turkish Experience Tuba Akbaytürk 24 th Annual IATUL Conference Ankara, Turkey.

The Impact of Consortial Purchasing on Library Acquisitions: the Turkish Experience

Tuba Akbaytürk

24th Annual IATUL Conference

Ankara, Turkey

Tradition of Cooperation among Libraries

Cooperation in Turkey

• 20 years of experience in document delivery services

• No corsortial access to e-resources until 1998

• ANKOS established as a national consortium

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10

20

30

40

50

60

70

2000 2001 2002 2003

ANKOS MEMBERS

SUBSCRIBEDDATABASES

Points of Interests

• Relations with vendors, language barrier

• Selection process

• Impact on:User trainingCopyright and fair use Analytical decision making (e.g. use of usage

stats)

Methodology

• Method of data collection: a questionnaire of 20 mostly closed-ended questions

• Sent by email to 76 institutions

• Overall return rate: 51%

• Special libraries, underrepresented in the sample and excluded from the analysis

Analysis

• Done in five categories:Respondent InstitutionsANKOS MembershipProduct Selection and EnglishProduct Selection and Methods usedMiscellaneous

Respondent Institutions

• Pricing of site licensed electronic resources shifts from the use of number of concurrent users to full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty and students.

• Large institutions pay large subscription fees proportioned to their FTE.

• Turkish state universities generally have large student bodies.

• The academic use of English is lower in Turkey.

Respondent Institutions, Cont.

• An alternative definition for FTE: Total number of faculty plus students enrolled in departments where the medium of instruction is English

State Universities

Foundation Universities

Mean FTE 10,989.58 2,500

Instruction fully in English

8.33% 61.53%

Respondent Institutions, Cont.

• Budget allocation for e-resources in 1999-2002:66% had an increase of 10% to 450% favoring

e-resources budget over print.Remaining 44% is either new institutions or

have subscribed e-resources for the 1st time in 2002.

8 institutions had savings due to print journal cancellations.

ANKOS Membership

• Controversial answers about when they joined ANKOS

• Could be due to a problem of semantics0

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1999 2000 2001 2002 2003

Year

No. o

f Ins

titut

ions Foundation University

State University

Other

ANKOS Membership, Cont.ResponseLower subscription prices 10 77% 23 96%More subscriptions 10 77% 20 83%Better license agreements that favor the Libraries

10 77% 19 79%

To avoid one-to-one dialog with vendors

6 46% 18 75%

Faster resolution of technical problems

3 23% 12 50%

Minimizing the duplication in print journal subscriptions in Turkey

6 46% 12 50%

Because everybody has joined 1 8%Other "Supporting institutions with limited budgets"

1 8%

Foundation Univ. State University

Product Selection and English

• Do libraries with no fluent English speaking acquisitions librarian(s) tend to work with local distributors or with vendors who have Turkish Sales Representative?with qualified librarian + did not matter 64% of Foundation Univ. and 13% of State Univ.

without qualified librarian + did not matter 18% of Foundation Univ. and 25% of State Univ.

Product Selection and English-Remarks-

• Other library staff, including the library director may facilitate the communication with foreign vendors.

• Some institutions marked “did not matter” rather than “other”, although they had no e-resources budget before 2003.

• 69% of all respondents selected “to avoid one-to-one dialog with vendors” as a reason to join ANKOS.

Product Selection and Methods used

• The prioritized list of methods used in determining products to subscribe to by computed means:

1. Faculty members’ suggestions

2. ANKOS’ announcements

3. Library staff recommendations

4. Vendors’ visits

5. Stands at conferences

6. Library listservs

Product Selection and Methods used -Remarks-

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all trialsannounced?

institutionalsubscriptions

held?

feedbackanalysis?

NO

YES

• All state universities and 8 foundation universities announce all of the ANKOS trials.• 83% of the respondents collect and analyze user feedback about the trials. Some complained about receiving very little feedback. • Only 2 state and 2 foundation universities (the ones who do not announce all trials!) have subscription in 2003 for products that ANKOS tried but could not establish a consortium.

Miscellaneous

• Copyright and fair use: One third of the respondents have a notice on their web

page and give instructions to users on this topic.The earliest notice is from 2001 whereas the

instructions go back to 1999.The time difference could be due to the fact that print

books and journals are subject to fair use as well and that many new libraries had their web site and their first subscriptions lately.

Miscellaneous

• Usage Statistics:92% of the respondents utilize usage stats for

decision making about database subscription and renewals.

10 institutions made cancellations due to low usage.

Timely initiative of ANKOS to structure a qualitative model to be shared by member institutions.

Miscellaneous

• Licensing:License agreements with their difficult legal

English used to be documents to be signed by all parties without questioning its clauses.

Only three respondents asked for amendments. ANKOS now has its model Turkish site license

and all contracts are subject to standard examination. Amendments requested, if necessary.

Miscellaneous

• User training:The investment on e-resources must pay the libraries

back in terms of high usage which can be promoted by outreaching programs such as user trainings.

81% of the respondents provide training for their subscribed databases.

ANKOS’ ongoing initiative about preparing user manuals and database fact sheets will increase this percentage and may bring some standardization to user training programs .

Conclusions and Recommendations

• ANKOS is not just an entity bringing purchasing power together.

• It supports its members in easing the communication with foreign vendors, in evaluating license agreements, in analyzing usage statistics, in providing user training, etc.

• Further research probably using focus group technique is needed.

THANK YOU

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