This past year at the University of Toronto, some anecdotal instances of increased student cost in one particular segment of the course materials market, that of course packs, received attention in the student press. According to this coverage, course packs had become more expensive as a direct result of the decision by the University of Toronto to not renew its collective license agreement with the Canadian copyright collective licensing agency, Access Copyright.1 A student told the University of Toronto student newspaper The Varsity, “my… professor told the class we would have to buy [the] course pack for nearly double the price it cost last year due to the termination of the Access Copyright license” (Robin 2014). Similar anecdotal stories have appeared at other institutions, as a growing number of universities and colleges in Canada have decided that the collective license agreement with Access Copyright was not worth the price at which it was being offered in negotiations, given the possibility of managing copyright costs internally. (More recently, students at Ryerson University expressed similar shock and disappointment with rising course pack costs in the aftermath of the expiration of Ryerson’s agreement with Access Copyright) (Chandler, 2016). As these student press articles show, there are undoubtedly some instances in which costs to students did rise significantly. However, depending on whether the instructor or producer of a given course pack was aware of the extent of their rights under Canadian copyright law and the contents of their library’s collections, these increased costs may have been unnecessary.
Cancilla, N. et al., (2017). Engaging Faculty and Reducing Costs by Leveraging Collections: A Pilot Project to Reduce Course Pack Use. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. 4. DOI: http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2137
The third and final section of the survey consisted of three questions about tasks performed when assessing a journal package for renewal. The prompt read: “When determining whether to renew a journal package, where do you perform the following tasks?” The three assessment tasks were: calculating cost per use of journal titles, comparing usage statistics with other packages, and viewing usage statistics. These three assessment tasks are overwhelmingly performed outside the system for all three LSPs, and percentages are comparable across systems. Cost per use (Q3.1) assessment is only performed in Alma by 5% of users, in Sierra by 4%, and in WSP by 6%.
Singley, Emily, and Jane Natches. “Finding the gaps: A survey of electronic resource management in Alma, Sierra, and WMS”, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107201. Note: Pre-print version of an article that will be published in Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship 29(2).
The author found that 74% of print titles acquired in 2008‐09 had been used within their first six years in the collection, and that 27% of print books acquired between 2008 and 2014 had been used between July 2013 and November 2014. By contrast, only 12% of the ebooks acquired between 2008 and 2014 were used during the same 17‐month period. The author examines how different print and electronic collection development models might affect monograph use in academic libraries within the context of previously published research.
Factors Affecting the Use of Print a nd Electronic Books: A Use Study and Discussion. Amy Fry. College and Research Libraries Pre-Print. December 14, 2016