eBook Evaluation Project

In this blog post, Ella Hale from the NHS England KLS Resource Discovery team reflects on her final apprenticeship project which supported the newly published national collections management guideline for knowledge and library services in England.

The template which Ella created can be used to evaluate other e-book packages which you may subscribe to locally. Please contact us to find out more.

I’m Ella Hale, one of the first line agents on the NHS Knowledge and Library Service Desk. I have a BA in Photography, and I previously worked in the NHS for 5 years before I stepped into the library world in 2022. As a newcomer to the librarian space, I decided to complete the Level 3 Library, Information & Archive Services Apprenticeship to further my knowledge and assist in learning my new role.

As the apprenticeship came to an end, I needed to complete a final project. In a stroke of luck and good timing, it transpired that my colleague Hélène Gorring was coming to the end of a project to create the new NHS England eBook Collections Management Guidance. This provided me with an opportunity to dedicate my final project to looking at the criteria proposed by the Collections Management Guidance Task and Finish Group and analyse an e-book collection in the National Core Content. The need to analyse the collections we purchase has been a topic of concern as we strive to improve the eBook collections we purchase and provide to our users.

“Purpose
The guidance covers stock acquisition with criterion to consider for books and journals, print and electronic; stock retention and withdrawal; as well as issues of equality, diversity, and inclusion.

The guideline is intended to inform local and nationally procured collection management.

It has been underpinned by a review of the literature and has been co-produced by a working group with knowledge & library staff representatives from each of the NHS regions in England and members of the NHS England Knowledge and Library services team.”- Collections management guidance

My project focused on the Healthcare Research Premium Collection provided by ProQuest. The project aims were to identify e-Books, analyse data, test weeding criteria and produce an Excel workbook to be replicated/become a template to help others use the criteria.

Proposed criteria to identify:

• Titles over 10 years
• Titles over 5 years for drug/psychopharmacology/exam revision/immunology/infection control/legal books
• Titles over 25 years for Psychotherapy books
• Foreign language titles
• Older editions or duplicate titles
• Any other anomalies

First Survey

The first survey, sent to 11 members of the Task & Finish group who were regional representatives from NHS knowledge and library services, gathered useful feedback and confirmed the proposed criteria. However, it was also identified that the origin of eBooks needed to be identified as we want to provide our users with content with a UK focus.

‘We put a lot of work and thought into our print collections, but less into ebooks, particularly if they are bought as a collection. Although ebooks don't take up physical space, they can still hinder a user who wants to find the most up to date, relevant and best quality information without having to sort through old, irrelevant and poor-quality ebooks.’ Anonymous survey participant

The process I took to analyse the data I analysed the data by downloading a spreadsheet of the collection’s title. I started by filtering the resource type to only show ‘books’, this left the 216 titles that needed to be analysed for this project. I then organised, formatted and colour coded each column. I then went on to search for each title individually looking to confirm publication dates and latest editions. I very much enjoyed the colour coding…

From the analysis of the data, these are the results:

• There were 216 eBooks in the collection
• There were 25 titles over 20 years old and 191 titles over 10 years old
• There were 7 titles over 5 years for drug/psychopharmacology/exam revision/immunology/infection control/legal books
• There were no titles over 25 years for Psychotherapy books - however there were 3 that were over 22 years old
• There were no foreign language titles
• There were 19 books that seem to be incorrectly categorised as books in the resource type field (they have Print ISSN's)
• There were 49 titles that have newer editions available 
• There were 104 titles published in the UK, 82 titles published in the USA and 30 titles published in Switzerland

Second survey of the working group

The final feedback I received after sharing my findings, and using a second survey, were that the criteria were useful, had successfully helped to identify books that we’re not interested in and there were no additions to the criteria needed. The participants said that they would not buy this package, based on the findings of this project,

If anyone is interested in viewing the final Excel workbook for inspiration or to use as a template, please feel free to email me at [email protected]

Thank you to all who assisted me in my project, it is greatly appreciated, and I passed the apprenticeship!