I can't see a blanket withdrawal policy working very well. I think it depends upon the subject content. If the old ebook's content is potentially harmful, surely it needs to be weeded in the same way as a paper copy?
If the content could be harmful, I'd remove hyperlinks from the catalogue. However, there's also a need to have access to the item blocked so that people who know that some books are hosted on a certain platform don't go straight there & search and find them.
Presumably the ebooks are accessed via some kind of authentication (eg Athens, Shibboleth, etc) so maybe the way to remove access is to get the hosting platform to remove it from the permission set as well as removing hyperlinks (otherwise you get lots of people complaining about a broken link!).
An ebook is really no different to a paper copy. So my view would be, if you would keep it on you library shelves (or maybe in a back up store), then keep access to it online. If you would withdraw it from your shelves, then withdraw it from online access.
Although with paper copies you might remove titles which related to areas of the curriculum no longer taught, there may not really be a need to do this for electronic books as they don't take up any physical space. The only issue I can think of is that items may not be actively monitored because they are no longer of relevance and eventually, through age, become outdated or harmful without anyone noticing. I suppose the format or platform might eventually become incompatible with the most commonly-used operating systems, so there may be some automatic weeding owing to technological issues.
By the way, I haven't been purchasing ebooks long enough for this to be an issue for me, so I'm probably talking through my hat!
Tricia Rey
Library
Queen Victoria Hospital
Holtye Road
East Grinstead
West Sussex
RH19 3DZ
01342 414266
-----Original Message-----
From: An informal open list set up by UKSG - Connecting the Information Community [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Lynn Crothall
Sent: 23 January 2014 19:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [lis-e-resources] Archiving/Weeding of e-books
Hello all,
Now that we've been buying e-books for a while we are starting to have
discussions around collection management policy. Should we "weed" our
e-books in the same way that we weed the physical collection, getting rid
of old editions, or titles relating to areas of curriculum no longer
taught? Can we have one policy for this across subject areas when currency
varies in importance by discipline? What about the technical side: just
suppress the catalogue record or remove the link to the e-book?
Could any of you who have had experience with this let me know how your
libraries manage this issue? I tried searching the archives of this list
and didn't see any previous posts on this topic.
Kind regards,
Lynn.
--
Lynn Crothall
Academic Liaison Librarian for the School of Computing and the School of
Psychology
Holloway Road Library
London Metropolitan University
236-250 Holloway Road
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