What seems logical to librarians (ebooks from publisher A have one bibliographic record, ebooks from publisher B have another record, another type of format has a different bibliographic record, etc.) doesn’t necessarily make it easy for the average user. Most people just want all the options in one place to consider, without having to switch records. I don’t blame them — it’s easier. On the far end, that is. For catalogers, it’s more work up front, but that’s our job — to provide convenient access, not get sticky about the purity of records.
So, when I took a poll of our librarians, the result I expected was the result I got. Put the ebooks on the same bibliographic records as the paper editions they represent, so they display in the catalog with all the options together.
However, nothing is as easy as it looks.
First, we just got 300+ ebooks from Credo. That’s a manageable number that I can deal with, and convert. Going back over thousands of netLibrary ebooks, on the other hand….
Plus, the group of Credo titles we just bought are (mostly) newer ones that are more likely to be used and therefore should be made convenient. We’ve had the netLibrary titles for longer.
When doing inventory, we count paper (or whatever hard physical format) by counting the item records attached to a bibliographic record, using a code in that. Item records, after all, have the barcode in them for the specific physical item.
Ebooks don’t need a barcode, so they normally don’t have item records (unless they need to go on electronic reserves, which works with item records…). So, we count them by what we call the BType (in Innovative terms, the BCode2) which for ebooks = @. So, just count all the bibliographic records with “@” in the BType field as ebooks.
Then I can just convert the paper bibliographic records to ebooks BType=@, and we’re all set. Count items for physical materials, and bib records for ebooks.
Except…
What if you have an ebook in both a netLibrary and a Credo version on the same record? If you count just the record, you only count 1 ebook, and you have 2. So, instead of deleting the ebook record in such cases, I just hide it from the public catalog but leave it in the system and set my search for ebooks (which is a Saved search for the library tech’s use) so it also picks up those hidden records.
So, now I’m working my way through the Credo books. I checked each title, used CTRL-G in Millennium Cataloging to see if the same title turned up, and found over 80 titles that need to be handled. Some are newer than what we have, so I just arrange to withdraw the older editions. Some are the same as existing paper copies in the collection, so I move the ebook data and link to the paper bibliographic record, and delete the ebook record. And for the netLibrary ones that are the same, I handle that as noted above.
The location in the bibliographic record can handle multiple locations, so if I have a paper location and the location “ebook” that shows up as “multi”. The BType becomes @ for ebook, even if there is a paper copy, so it “counts” in the inventory as an ebook, but in the item count as paper.
If I need to create an item for putting an ebook on reserve, that is in a category that we don’t inventory, so it’s never counted.
How long I can do this remains to be seen, but it looks like it will be easier on patrons, and that’s what counts.
