Deaccession of Print Books in a Transitional Age II: Business, Science, and Interdisciplinary Studies

IntroductionIn a previous paper it was argued that deaaccession of print books in the humanities and social sciences should be carried out in a step-wise, prudential manner, taking into account the limitations of digitization and interlibrary loan and the under-development of consortia. (Woolwine, 2014) This article is a follow-up study on the deaccession of print books in business and science collections and in those parts of collections which serve interdisciplinary studies and research.MethodologyThis paper will use citation studies, studies on information seeking behavior, book format preferences and book format use (print versus electronic) to draw conclusions concerning deaccession of print books in business, science, and interdisciplinary studies in academic libraries. The method employed is a traditional literature review. (Torgerson, 2003)Comparative and General ArticlesSlater (2010) in a review of the literature holds that "The literature to date indicates computer science, business and economics are consistently more heavily used in e-book format than their print counterparts." (313) He notes that although electronic books allow more immediate access than do print books, that print books often provide more continuous access since electronic books, unless downloaded, require a connection to the Internet. Restrictions on downloading, limiting viewing to a page at a time, print restrictions, and one-user access licenses, have prevented a wider acceptance of electronic books. (314-315) Lack of content in some academic subject areas has also restricted purchasing and general use. (321) Ordering electronic books is often more complicated for librarians and pricing models sometimes make them, in fact, more expensive than print titles. (325) The cost differential between electronic books and print books in academic libraries has been confirmed by Bailey, et al. (2015) All of this has restricted overall availability, use and ultimate acceptance. The most important finding of Lamothe (2010, 2012, 2013) is that the size of the collection of electronic books increased use. This was also the finding of an earlier study in which, although the conclusion was not explicitly drawn, those disciplines with the largest number of electronic books tended to have the highest number of uses and highest average use. (Sprague and Hunter, 2009) Lamothe also notes that reference books in electronic format were more likely to be used than non-reference monographs.Staiger (2012), in a summary of literature on the use of electronic books across disciplines, found that studies supported the conclusion that academic users of electronic books search in them for bits of information rather than read them thoroughly. Whether this differs from standard use of academic books is not established. He also found that those in the social sciences and humanities were the least likely to be satisfied with electronic books.Tenopir, Volentine and King (2012) conducted a large survey of British academics in multiple disciplines. They found that articles were considered most important overall for research purposes but that academics gather information from a variety of sources, with both the Internet and personal contacts supplementing library resources. They also found that books remain important to academics for both teaching and research, especially in the humanities. Those in the humanities read on average 20.5 books or book chapters per year, social scientists read 9.02, engineering and technology faculty read 5.27, medical and health faculty read 3.7 and other scientists read 3.04.Catalano (2013), in a meta-analysis of the literature, found that most of the patterns hold for graduate students. Graduate students in the humanities expressed some concern about the continued availability of older materials in an environment dominated by electronic resources. Art students did not find electronic resources entirely satisfactory. …