Ebooks

Where to start on ebooks? That has been the question I have been asking myself for the past couple of weeks. We have an EBSCO account and I knew that I needed to create a list of books on it so that the readers would be able to choose ones that interested them. (We are using a scheme whereby we only pay for a book when it has been downloaded by a reader.)

My hunch was that we needed to have a list of our most popular books in the library and that ebooks should come from that list. It took me a while to figure out how to make that report--nobody else in the office knew how! Eventually I was able to create a list of popular books by making a Weed by Number of Charges report. It had to be this since asking for a list by charges only tells you what books are currently out on loan for some strange reason. Anyway, I asked the system to give me a weeding list of books that have been checked out of the library more than 10 times. Finally, that gave me what I wanted.

I didn't really know if making this list would be useful--if ebooks should come from our most popular books. It was just my intuition. However, when my manager asked me how it was going and I told him what I had done, he nodded as though this was the usual way for going about things. So yeah, look at me, thinking like a librarian and making important decisions all on my own. Woot!