What is the ideal size of a group that is purchasing digital content? Some states engage in statewide purchasing of digital resources, but I wonder how well that will continue to work as digital content becomes a larger part of our collections. New York state, for example, offers NOVELny (New York Online Virtual Electronic Library) as a set of resources for all students and residents of New York across all grades and library types. That is a laudable goal, and when digital content was scarce it was very helpful to level the field across a large and diverse state. Today, however, the statewide system is falling apart. Its time has come and gone. Not only is digital content no longer scarce, but attempts to provide a best-fit collection for such a broad audience have broken down.
Recently, the New York State Division of Library Development terminated the NOVELny steering committee. The group had been charged with gathering feedback and providing input from the different types of libraries involved in the group. Now I guess the winner will be either the squeakiest library type—or maybe nobody. An example of the breakdown is happening right now. With less than a month to go before the start of school, NOVELny has yet to announce the lineup for the coming academic year. Over the past three years, NOVELny has had core periodical products from all three major providers: EBSCO, ProQuest, and now Gale. While I would argue that there isn’t really much difference in the content, there is a lot of training for end users to prepare them for major shifts in interface design. On the back end, each individual organization that purchases digital content also has decisions that are impacted by NOVELny’s lineup.
When the state offering switched to Gale, all those individual Gale orders had to be ended. In many cases, libraries then picked up products from ProQuest that were leaving the NOVELny lineup—a headache not only for libraries, but also for vendors. Right now, New York state libraries are in a quandary over what encyclopedia will be included in NOVELny. My sources tell me that the current Grolier product is being dropped for Encyclopaedia Britannica. Okay, except Britannica doesn’t have strong support for younger learners and doesn’t offer Lexile leveling for Common Core support. It seems that here school libraries—not to mention all the students and teachers across New York state—are taking a back seat to other things. If this yet-to-be-announced change does come to pass, schools and vendors will once again face a purchasing nightmare.
So is this the end of statewide purchases? Maybe not, but I wonder how much longer multitype groups can stay together. As digital content becomes more central to our collections, the loss of a key resource is more damaging. Each type of library is going to have its own needs, and those needs will be more and more mission critical. If school libraries aren’t buying print encyclopedias, then having a product offered statewide pulled out from under them hurts more than ever.
The lure of digital is that we can go big. Statewide, even national! But is that the right size?