So the library where I work has close to 2,300 electronic textbooks (and another couple of thousand we just got in a couple of packages and are super excited about getting to process).
They're all highlighted on a special e-books page of our website, where they're searchable by title, author, year, or by which of our 120-ish subject pages we've stuck them on.
They're also accessible through the library catalog, of course. And we know that multiple points of access makes an item's existence extra awesome, so I want them in the catalog, but I've begun to think that at some point it no longer makes as much sense to separate out electronic books on their own page.
It makes sense if there aren't that many of them, and you want to say, "hey, look, this is a special thing we have: e-books! Check 'em out! Or rather, you don't have to check 'em out, because they don't circulate! Hahahahaha! Librarian jokes are the best!"
OK, maybe we really only wanted to say the first part, since everyone already thinks we're huge geeks. But anyway, if e-books (and e-journals) are sort of a special feature, then yes, you want to point to them specially.
And a few hundred electronic titles, categorized by subject, makes sense. You can even browse through a list like that to see if anything looks good--it's a way to differentiate a certain type of resource so someone could take a quick look and see if there was anything on their topic available online.
Lately, though, e-books are becoming a bigger and bigger part of the collection, and I'm not sure this model still works. We have around 25,000 titles on paper, so e-books are already more than 10% of the collection, once we finish adding the mountain of new titles. An even larger percentage of newer titles will be electronic, since some of our print volumes are very old (some kept intentionally for historical interest, and some just still on the shelves because we haven't had time to do a good weed in a while).
And 5,000 titles, even broken down by subject or alphabetically, are not really that easy to browse on a web screen, so it becomes less likely that someone will be immediately able to see what they're looking for by consulting the e-books page. Ease of access, as well as advertising, was presumably the initial purpose of the separate e-books page, and I'm not sure how well it fulfills the former purpose anymore.
I'm thinking that at some point we might want to simply eliminate the "e-books" page, which is already becoming unwieldy, and let e-books, like all our books, just be accessed through the catalog. (This is even more true of journals, where we have almost no current print subscriptions and an enormous, bloated list of titles on the e-journals page, but I'll think about journals another time.)
The problem, I guess, is that people might not find them there, but that's no more a problem for e-books than for any books, as far as I can tell.
Again, it comes down to a question of whether these are a special resource we offer, that needs special advertising, or just a resource we offer, that gets the same attention as any other. And the way things are going with our collection development, I don't really think e-books are a big special deal anymore. Everyone has them, people know about them, they're just one of the ways we try to make stuff people might want to use available for them.
I'm only partly having these thoughts because it would save Tech Services a lot of time if we didn't have to put all these titles on the web page as well as in the catalog.
I swear, it's also a sincere question about how we can best serve our core audience!
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