This blogpost is a response to chapter 6 from in Sue Polanka’s No Shelf Required: E-Books Libraries. In many ways this chapter seemed irrelevant in my current context as it was written in 2002, and in the last 20 years there has been much change: the processes of acquiring e-books has been streamlined and refined.
In my current context, we have a subscription through Wheelers Books which gives our school community access to the consortium. Additionally, we purchase titles that are requested by patrons (patron driven acquisition—PDA). We purchase additional licenses for titles that are on the school curriculum, particularly for English. This hybrid approach seems to work really well for our students and staff.
However for future contexts, there are some important things I can keep in mind, such as ensuring that E-reference and E-text books are available to ensure school-wide accessibility. E-literature is a must: students must have access to literature day and night, from wherever they are. At my previous context with a tighter budget, I encouraged students to sign up to be a member of their local library so that they could have access to BorrowBox and thus thousands of E-books and audio books. In my current context, we are encouraging our students to make use of our well-resourced library as much as possible, so providing an option for students to have their book requests fulfilled is ideal.
I wonder which vendors provide pay-per-view, as this is not a process I am familiar with in the school library context but in some ways makes a lot of sense. In my previous context we received standing orders from Scholastic, which yielded very mixed quality so I do generally prefer to hand-select, however sometimes that is not humanly possible with time constraints.
Reference:
Jenkinson, D. (2002). Selection and censorship: It’s simple arithmetic. School libraries in Canada, 2(4), 22.