August 22, 2017, by Katherine Beers

More Books? How to make the most of your library collections

Our More Books service has been available for a few months already and is proving to be very popular! The service is designed to make it easier and quicker for students and staff to request books to be added to our library collections. This service is designed to help you choose the best route for getting hold of books that we don’t have at all, or where we don’t have enough copies.

There are 3 choices available:

1. Tell us if we need to buy more copies –  sometimes putting a book in short loan isn’t enough, tell us if we need to do more
2. Suggest a book we do not already have –  we’ll prioritise purchasing against teaching, learning and research priorities but will try to buy wherever we can
3. Request an Interlibrary Loan – ideal for a one-off use or if it’s a journal article we don’t subscribe to

The Library will also continue to do what we always have done which is:

• Monitor books in high demand and either buy more copies, or put books into short loan so everyone gets a better chance of access
• Invest in ebooks for all new titles and wherever possible aim to provide both electronic and print versions
• Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA)  – provide access to ebooks on demand, or make permanent additions to our collections if proving really popular
• Add online reading lists – we are working really hard alongside academic colleagues to make as many reading lists available online as possible. We buy core texts, using the number of students on the course to inform how many we should purchase.

So why change?

Even though we have over a million print and ebooks available for you to use in our libraries and, wherever possible, we base our purchasing decisions on your recommendations, you have told us through the NSS and our Library Customer Survey that it isn’t enough. Every year we spend every penny of our book budget but want to make the best decisions, and for that we need to hear from you.

The new book suggestion form will feed the information directly into our library system to speed up our processes, in addition you will be able to track your more book requests in your library account.

Please comment on this blog if you would like to share your thoughts. If you are an academic and would like advice on how to develop your collections, please email the collections team.

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