It considers the impact of this strategy in the context of ALIA's recent prediction that ‘library print and ebook collections will establish a 50:50 equilibrium by 2020 and that this balance will be maintained for the foreseeable future’ (Australian Library & Information Association, Citation2013). This paper examines some of the factors that have led to the implementation of an ‘epreferred’ acquisitions strategy at Curtin University Library, with particular reference to the development of ebook collections. Online video formats are outside the scope of this paper, but will continue to pose challenges for collection development for some time to come (Wells & Blackwood, Citation2012).Īs electronic resources have become increasingly central to the acquisitions process and increasingly accepted by clients, academic libraries have introduced strategies to reduce purchasing of physical items, and at least potentially to remove previously purchased physical items from the collection in favour of electronic equivalents. A third format, audiovisual and particularly video material, is still relatively underrepresented in digital form, as complexities in both delivery technology on the one hand, and licensing and rights management on the other, make it unlikely that, for example, VHS and DVD can be systematically superseded by online video in the short term. Books, the main focus of this article, are currently in something of a transitional stage, with physical and electronic copies coexisting in most academic libraries, though developments in publishing and technology are making ebook formats more practically attractive.
Academic journal publishers began to follow shortly after, and while print copies of journals continue to be produced, it is now the electronic versions which are overwhelmingly preferred by both libraries and scholars throughout at least the developed world. The publishers of indexes and other types of reference work which required constant updating were among the first to see the benefits of online distribution of content, even before the invention of the world wide web in the mid-1990s. The trajectory of digitisation has proceeded at different rates for different types of information resource. The work of universities in promoting teaching, learning and research is thus made more efficient, and the potential reach of any individual university is vastly increased – and this is particularly important in the context of increasing national and global competition for students and for funding. Fundamental is the realisation that the electronic online environment enables libraries to provide a much richer set of resources to a much wider audience, and to remove the barriers of space and time which applied to traditional, print-based collections. There are many reasons why acquiring information resources in electronic formats has been an attractive proposition for university libraries.
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