Portland State University Library General Collections Guidebook

Jill Emery and Elsa Loftis

Portland State University Library Information Resources Management Council

Portland, OR

Portland State University Library General Collections Guidebook by Jill Emery & Elsa Loftis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Contents

- Introduction to the General Collection Development Guidebook

- PSU Library’s General Collection Values

- 1. PSU Library's Licensing Principles

- 2. PSU Library Budget Overview

- 3. Databases Overview

- 4. EJournals & EJournal Packages Overview

- 5. Ebooks Overview

- 6. Statement on Textbooks Offered by the Portland State University Library

- 7. Streaming Media Overview

- 8. General Physical Collections Overview

- 9. APC Funding & Open Access Overview

- 10. PSU Authors Overview

- 11. Gifts of Funding & Material to the General Library Collections

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Introduction to the General Collection Development Guidebook

The purpose of the General Collection Development Guidebook is for the Portland State University Library to highlight information regarding the PSU Library general collections. We do not cover our unique collections within special collections & archives, PDXScholar, digital exhibits, University archives digital gallery, government information & maps or Dark Horse Comics in this document. In addition,  this documentation provides overviews on how we purchase and provide access to material for Portland State for use with instruction and research. This document is a framework regarding the ways we can collect and offer general resources to the PSU campus. These processes and structures are continually evolving and changing. For this reason, please read this document as our best practices at this moment in time. For any questions related to the PSU Library’s general collection, please ask your subject liaison or the collection development & management librarian.

PSU Library’s General Collection Values

Jill Emery

Portland State University Library’s General Collections Values

Accepted by PSU Library Information Resource Management Council

November 2019

Reviewed June 2020

PSU Library workers dedicate ourselves to: elevate student success, advance excellence in teaching and research, commit to equity and inclusion in representation, and develop sustainable access to our collections and resources.

We do this by focusing our collection values and priorities on being led by local scholars, user focused, and mission driven.

Scholar Led

- Collection decisions for selection and deselection are made with thoughtfulness and nuance geared towards each discipline by librarians with input from campus units, departments, colleges, faculty, and students.

- Selections by format are consistent with the needs of the discipline and students’ ability to successfully use the resources.

- Disciplinary criteria for selection and retention vary by discipline and are established by librarians in consultation with their respective departments.

- The collection and purchasing of faculty and student publications and edited works are a priority for maintaining the scholarly record of Portland State University.

User Focused

- The resources purchased and supported by the PSU Library collection are from vendors and publishers who prioritize accessibility, racial equity and inclusion, provide intuitive interfaces, are as free from digital rights management (DRM) as possible, and with the least amount of contractual restrictions.

- Our collections represent the diversity of the PSU community in relevant languages and supporting cross-cultural interaction. We regularly collect resources that represent marginalized communities and strive to highlight these materials on a regular basis.

- We strive to allow our resources to serve the broader community through interlibrary borrowing agreements, consortia participation, and document access programs.

Mission Driven

- We commit to “Letting Knowledge Serve…” the motto of Portland State University and racial justice with our collection strategies.

- Collection development and management align with the PSU strategic directions to support the balance for teaching/learning materials and research materials.

- A prime goal is to support open access as much as possible; providing ready access to resources for future, current, and past scholars.

- We dedicate ourselves to maintaining sustainable collections which serve long term availability and access to the scholarly endeavors and directions of the PSU community.

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PSU Library's Licensing Principles

Jill Emery

Licensing Principles

Drafted October/November 2019

Accepted by the Library Information Resource Management Council  December 2019

Guided by the Portland State University Library’s General Collection Values  the PSU Library commits to entering into contract agreements with scholarly content providers and publishers who uphold the following principles:

Recognize that PSU’s Library community is comprised of the following “authorized users”: all current students, faculty, and staff of Portland State University (regardless of location) and as a public institution founded to ‘Let Knowledge Serve the City’, the PSU Library’s “authorized users” includes alumni and library patrons accessing our collection onsite (a.k.a. “walk-in users”).

Allow for resource sharing locally, through our consortia partners, and through Interlibrary Loan. Our users should not face any barriers to use of copyrighted materials for non-commercial, educational, instructional, and research purposes. In addition, the PSU Library should be able to deliver reasonable length extracts from licensed information to other libraries that have not signed a contract for that information for use by a specific patron in accordance with the Interlibrary Loan Provision of section 108 of the US Copyright Law.

The PSU Library is committed to purchasing resources which are fully accessible to all of our authorized users. Resources must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and in a manner consistent with the Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The PSU Library will only sign agreements for content that has an accurate, completed WCAG Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) to demonstrate compliance with accessibility standards.

Transparency of the agreements the PSU Library sign are critical to ensuring equity regarding the costs and access of scholarly content. There should be no restrictions on sharing information with our stakeholders or library community at large.

Portland State University authors should retain the copyright to their work and be able to re-use their own work as they see fit. Furthermore, there should be no embargo imposed on a PSU author from making an immediate deposit of their work into PDXScholar or other subject-based, national, or open repositories, or archives of their choosing.

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PSU Library Budget Overview

Jill Emery

The fiscal year 2020-2021 general collections budget for the PSU Library is $4,059,081 from our education and general funds. This money is divided up between electronic resources which can be databases, data sets, journal packages, journal subscriptions, one time purchased ebooks & streaming media and the purchase of physical materials which are generally DVDs, newspapers, print magazines & journals, and print books .

Here is the general breakdown between the two:

Online/Electronic Resource Budget: $3,924,143

Physical Materials Budget: $111,938

Pie Chart of the difference between electronic resource budget and physical resource budget

In the past five years, we have received funding from the Office of Academic Affairs to cover inflationary costs on packages and ongoing subscriptions. This year, we are asking providers to either keep us at a flat inflationary rate (same cost in 2021 as the costs were in 2020) or at a rate of no more than 2% last year’s cost in order to avoid significant cancellation of content. We have been successful in negotiating these percentages with most providers for this fiscal year.

Our goal is to fund collections at the macro level as opposed to the micro level in order to leverage our funding as best possible. Here is what the general format breakdown looks like:

Pie Chart showing the breakdown of funding by APC, Databases, DVDs, EBooks, EJournals & EJournal Packages, Print Books, Print Journals, & Streaming Media

As the pie chart indicates, EJournals & Databases are the major expenditures of the collections budget.

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Databases Overview

The PSU Library provides access to a multitude of databases for instruction and research. Access the A-Z listing of database and article resources to find databases.

Given the current budget, in order to add new databases, we would need to cut one of similar cost in the same subject area. Databases can be ordered during the course of the fiscal year. The PSU Library prefers to run a trial to make sure databases work in our online environment prior to purchasing. To request a trial of a database, contact your subject liaison  or the suggest a purchase form.

Consolidated/Convair Aircraft Factory San Diego Year: 1950 from the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive

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EJournals & EJournal Packages Overview

The PSU Library has subscription agreements with the majority of scholarly society and commercial publishers in North America & Europe. In some cases, the journals are bought as a collection from a single scholarly publisher such as the American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press journals, Elsevier Science Direct journals, and the University of Chicago journals. In other cases, we buy journal titles individually from providers such as DeGruyter Publications and Oxford University Press.

New journals emerge annually, journal titles change, and journals move from one scholarly publisher to another. For tips on searching for articles and journals, use this guide. If you are unable to locate a journal title in the Primo, the library catalog, please contact your subject liaison or fill out a suggest a purchase form.

Institutional journal subscriptions are supplied on a calendar year from January-December by scholarly societies and commercial publishers. For this reason, the PSU Library tries to order all new titles in either the summer or fall months. As with databases, we currently cannot add a new journal title without removing one of equal cost in the same discipline. Open access journals can be added to our catalog at any time.

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Ebooks Overview

The PSU Library purchases ebooks in numerous ways and are committed to buying ebooks that have no digital rights management (DRM) or very limited DRM used. Digital rights management means limitations on the number of users able to access a book simultaneously, limits on the number of pages that can be printed, and limits on the number of downloads allowed in a given year.  For this reason, we currently avoid buying ebook titles that are limited to a single user or three users at a time.

We support the front list (current year titles) purchases of unlimited access ebook titles through our consortium, the Orbis Cascade Alliance, from the following publishers:

- Oxford University Press

- John Wiley Online Library

In addition, through our consortium, we also have access to a subscription base of unlimited access academic ebooks from ProQuest Ebook Central and a collection of unlimited access science technical, & medical (STM) ebook titles from Cambridge University Press. With both of these packages, we can lose ebook access annually.

Locally, we buy ebook collections annually from the following providers:

- JSTOR (university press and small scholarly presses)

- Project Muse (university presses)

- Springer/Nature (psychology & behavioral science titles)

Many commercial publishers refuse to sell ebooks, especially e-textbooks, to institutions and only make these titles available to individuals. We will attempt to buy any ebook requested by faculty, students, and staff.

You can search for our currently available ebooks. To learn more about how downloading and printing ebooks works with different platforms use this guide.

To order ebooks, contact your subject liaison or submit the suggest a purchase form.

If you want to request an ebook for course reserves, please use the course reserves form.

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Statement on Textbooks Offered by the Portland State University Library

Statement on Textbooks Offered by the Portland State University Library

August 5, 2020

As we approach the Fall 2020 quarter, PSU Library faculty and staff are working hard to provide alternative access to the print course reserves collection. A significant portion of the books on reserve are print copies of required textbooks. Due to the constraints of building capacity, staffing, and the handling of materials with a short turn around, we are unable to offer print course reserves for checkout in the fall.

Library faculty and staff continuously explore approaches to how we acquire course textbooks to ensure that students have access electronically. This work is made arduous by textbook publishers who do not provide electronic purchasing options, and therefore create access inequities for students including further barriers for disabled students who rely on electronic copies for access. Many existing course textbooks are simply unavailable for purchase to any library, regardless of budget, in any format other than print.

Textbook publishers have built their profit models around selling e-textbooks directly to students. We also know that the cost of textbooks and other course materials are a barrier for students at every university. Also, this model sends taxpayer funded student financial aid back to content providers, who further exploit faculty labor and research to monopolize and dominate knowledge production.

This is not a library problem. This is an industry problem that impacts everyone in higher education: students, advocates in support and success roles, faculty and institutional research output, grant funding, and confuses prestige and paywalls with quality in scholarship evaluation.

Despite the PSU Library’s commitment to make copies of all high enrollment textbooks and course materials available to assist those students who are unable to purchase their own, the following publishers will not allow us to purchase an e-textbook version of their publications or in a way that makes them viable for multiple student access:

- Pearson

- Cengage

- McGraw Hill

- Oxford University Press

- Sage Publications

- Most publishers of ‘common reads,’ popular fiction, and popular nonfiction

- Many health sciences texts

This means that in courses that have adopted textbooks by these publishers, students who do not purchase the textbook will not have any alternative access to the textbook content. For classes requiring textbooks from these publishers, the only option for a student will be to purchase or lease an expensive print or e-textbook. These publishers have the resources and platforms to support online access by academic libraries, and choose not to do so.

We are here to work with course instructors to explore and identify viable textbook alternatives, including:

- Using an existing e-book in the relevant subject area from the library’s e-book collection or requesting that the library purchase one. Many academic e-books aren’t considered textbooks, and are therefore available for the library to purchase.

- Adopting an open educational resource (OER). OERs are freely available educational materials that are openly licensed to allow for re-use and modification by faculty and instructors. There are several publishing platform options available to faculty.

- Find available OER textbooks on the Guide on Open Educational Resources

- Pressbooks, an open creation platform, is managed by the Office of Academic Innovation (OAI)

- PDXOpen is the platform maintained by the Portland State University Library providing alternatives that can be adapted and adopted. Please contact our Digital Initiatives Unit for further information.

- Creating an online course pack in D2L by:

- Linking to content from the library’s existing collection of electronic resources (e-books, journal articles, streaming media, and other digital materials).

When the PSU Library licenses or purchases electronic materials, we strongly prefer materials that are unlimited in use and free from digital rights management (DRM) so that students don’t have to compete with each other for access. DRM includes limits on the number of users that can access a resource at any one time, as well as limits on pages that can be copied, printed and downloaded. PSU faculty members and instructors teaching this fall may contact your  subject liaison at any time for support with sourcing their course materials, or submit a Suggest a Purchase form for e-books that may be used as alternatives to traditional textbooks.

This statement is drawn from statements made by our colleagues at  Grand Valley State University Libraries & at the University of Guelph Libraries. We thank them for taking the lead on these issues and letting us adapt their content with permission.

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Streaming Media Overview

Elsa Loftis

The PSU Library provides access to thousands of streaming video and music files from multiple providers. Search for streaming media content.

If you need streaming media files put on course reserves, fill out the course reserves form.

We understand that you have specific ideas regarding streaming media content you want to use for your courses. Our collection of streaming films comes from subscription services such as Academic Films Online, Films on Demand, and Docuseek, to name a few. We also license films on a title by title basis as we are able. You can request titles we do not have readily available from your subject liaison or through the suggest a purchase form. We will work with our vendors and film distributors to secure streaming licenses for requested content when available, but please understand that streaming media can be very costly, especially for feature films. Under normal circumstances, we will purchase one year licenses for a film. If a film has a limited license, you will see an expiration date for the film in the PSU Library Catalog record. Sometimes we are able to purchase licenses for longer periods, such as three years, or the life of a file, but this can be prohibitively expensive. However, if the film requested is of enduring value in our collection, please note this in your request.

The library is glad to offer thousands of streaming films to support your courses. If you intend to require viewing of a film that the library does not currently provide, we will try to locate an educational streaming license in certain cases. Due to budgetary restrictions, however, should a requested film be available for rental from a commercial platform such as Amazon/Netflix/etc., the library cannot provide a license. Students will have to make their own arrangements for access.

Like with online ebooks, not all streaming media content is made available for institutional purchase and the majority of commercially produced streaming content found on streaming platforms like Amazon Prime, Hulu, & Netflix is not available for the PSU Library to supply. Some feature films produced overseas may be difficult to secure licensing for if there are no U.S. distributors. In addition, many of the historic documentaries produced by PBS and WGBH are not available for purchase by institutions. Network television shows are also extremely difficult to locate for educational licensing. In these cases, students may have to make their own arrangements to stream content (often by paying rental fees to commercial platforms or subscribing to services like Disney+ or Amazon Prime, etc.). For film-intensive courses, this might be seen as a textbook cost, but if you would like to avoid having your students using commercial vendors for educational content, please work with your subject liaison to find alternatives.

Several of our streaming media providers license films to the PSU Library with Public Performance Rights (PPR), but in some cases, those rights are not part of the license. Please note, you do not need PPR to show a film in a class, but it is required if you are doing a film festival or showing a film in a community area. If you are unsure, or you have any other questions about streaming media, please consult Elsa Loftis, Acquisitions Librarian, at eloftis@pdx.edu.

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General Physical Collections Overview

Millar Library is a five story building with a basement. Our physical collections are arranged by the Library of Congress classification system. The beginning of the classification system begins in the basement and continues up to the fifth floor. We provide floor maps for your convenience in finding resources and spaces within the library.

Primo, the library catalog, shows locations of where material is located.

Over a third of the PSU Library’s physical collection is located offsite in a remote storage warehouse. This location is readily identifiable in Primo by the word: Offsite and then the call number. You can request material from storage here.

The PSU Library is a member of the Orbis Cascade Alliance consortium serving academic libraries in the Pacific Northwest. There are 37 participating libraries including Lewis & Clark University, Oregon State University, Reed College,  University of Idaho, University of Oregon, University of Portland, and the University of Washington to name a few. Through our participation, we save money on shared content negotiations and are able to provide expanded access to many electronic resources, especially ebooks.

The PSU Library has resource sharing agreements that allow faculty, students, and staff the ability to borrow physical material from the majority of these libraries. This process is called SUMMIT borrowing. The material is sent from the library where it was requested and can be picked up at the PSU Library circulation desk or delivered to you. COVID-19 has impacted the number of SUMMIT libraries participating in resource sharing during Fall 2020.

The PSU Library can also loan articles, book chapters, and books from other academic libraries in the nation and internationally through interlibrary lending (ILL). You can learn more about ILL. Again, the COVID-19 pandemic limits the ILL services normally provided.

To order physical material needed for instruction or research, contact your subject liaison or fill out the suggest a purchase form.

all material can be put on course reserves by using the course reserves request form.

Book stacks taken by Mary Haidri

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APC Funding & Open Access Overview

The PSU Library budgets $15,000 annually to pay for article processing charges in fully open access journals. Funds are awarded to eligible authors/creators on a first-come first-served basis, and funds last until expended in a given fiscal year. Learn more about how the funds are dispersed here.

For the discovery of scholarly open access content in all subject areas, use this guide.

The PSU Library supports and manages the campus open access policy.

The availability of open access scholarship from faculty and students is through our platform, PDXScholar. For questions regarding content available in PDXScholar, contact the digital initiatives team.

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PSU Authors Overview

The PSU Library budgets for buying books produced by PSU faculty authors. We consider this to be part of our collecting of the locally scholarly record and for this reason, we generally buy print books as opposed to ebooks by faculty authors. We will purchase ebooks copies of faculty authored work upon request or when learning that an ebook is used for instruction.

We review announcements of faculty publications in PSU’s Currently Newsletter and through our main book provider, we have an alert system set-up to notify us when new titles are published by PSU faculty. You are also welcome to notify us of your recent publications either through alerting your subject liaison or through using the suggest a purchase form.

Each Spring, we share a list of the faculty books we’ve purchased with Research & Graduate Studies to be highlighted during Research Week.

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Gifts of Funding & Material to the General Library Collections

The PSU Library will readily accept gifts of funding and of material to support instruction and research that we do not already own.

Financial support can be made through the Library Information Resources Fund donation form.

With gifts of material, we request that donors provide us with a list of the material to be donated for us to review against our collection. We cannot accept obsolete formats such as cassette tapes, VHS tapes, or vinyl records to name a few.

Gifts of materials must be pre-arranged either with a subject liaison or with the collection development & management librarian.

Learn more about gifts of materials.