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This article describes the Purdue University Libraries mandatory co-mentoring program. Surveys with all Purdue University Libraries faculty librarians and select follow-up interviews were conducted. This program supports all faculty librarians and differs from other mentoring programs since it is team-based, includes the supervisor, and advises on promotion. These Faculty Review Committees integrate performance reviews with progress toward promotion and have the responsibility to prepare written annual reviews and evaluations, and represent the candidate at the promotion review. The program is considered very effective at Purdue University Libraries and a unique model. This program is also compared to four other ARL co-mentoring programs using a survey and follow-up interviews.

When Purdue University’s College of Education decided to offer its first fully online master’s program in Learning Design and Technology, the education librarian volunteered to find and organize all the course readings by creating a LibGuide web page with links to the readings for each course. This paper analyzes these course readings, delivered to distance education students through links to the library’s electronic holdings, between January 2012 and June 2014. It categorizes the readings as journal articles, books (or chapters in books), and other openly available scholarly resources on the web. Since this book is primarily about e-books, the analysis focuses on chapters and books used for these courses. Approximately half the required readings are journal articles, about one third are books or book chapters, and about one fifth are freely available reports or web pages. The journal articles are readily available via library subscriptions; however, approximately 60% of the books needed are not available in electronic format for purchase at any price. The analysis concludes that the library cannot meet the e-book demand for distance education students because many of the required books are not available for library purchase in digital format.

With so many advantages, it seems logical that librarians would be eager to switch from purchasing books in print to embrace the electronic format. However the transition to e-books in academic libraries has not been a smooth or quick one and the reasons are myriad and complicated. Aware that this is still a time of transition and that there are many issues surrounding the e-book, the editors set out to present the state of e-books in academic libraries today. They invited knowledgeable publishers and librarians to write about the current challenges, successes, and trends. In addition, there is a section that analyzes new data about user interaction with e-books and an essay written by a teaching faculty member who uses and encourages her student to use e-books

Introductory article to the Special Issue: Patron-Driven Acquisition: Current Successes and Future Directions

The Purdue University Libraries was an early implementer of purchasing books requested through interlibrary loan rather than borrowing the requested books. The service, called Books on Demand, began in January 2000. An analysis of the requests at the end of the first two years of service indicated that these patron-selected books were more likely to have repeat circulations than the books acquired through normal collection development processes. When the program reached its tenth year, the authors analyzed and compared the books purchased through Books on Demand with all other purchased books during the same period. Findings indicate that books acquired through this user-initiated program have higher circulation rates than books acquired through the normal selection channels. The difference is quite large, a mean of 4.1 compared to a mean of 2.4, when the first ILL use is included as a circulation. Therefore the authors recommend libraries investigate a service of purchasing books requested via interlibrary loan as a complement to other collection development efforts.

Annual journal inflation rates of eight percent or higher have compelled libraries to cancel journals. Since 1992 Purdue Libraries have had three major cancellation projects. This article reviews how the Humanities, Social Science and Education Library approached this task in 2009 and developed a database management program to identify titles based on two criteria: low use and the availability of the title in full text in one of three aggregator databases. The education and humanities departments reached the cancellation goal, but several social science departments had to transfer funds from the book budget to accommodate their journal subscription costs. This indicates the importance of the journal to research in these areas.

More and more students are majoring in business in colleges and universities today and need access to legal materials. Undergraduate libraries are feeling pressure from these departments to build basic legal collections. This is an awesome responsibility because legal publications are very expensive to purchase initially and must be kept up-to-date. Since library literature provides little guidance for the librarian in this endeavor, I would like to pass on to others the knowledge I have gained by building a legal collection in an undergraduate library.