1. The Impact of Consortial Purchasing on Library Acquisitions: the Turkish Experience Tuba Akbaytürk 24 th Annual IATUL Conference Ankara, Turkey

2. Tradition of Cooperation among Libraries

3. Cooperation in Turkey 20 years of experience in document delivery services No corsortial access to e-resources until 1998 ANKOS established as a national consortium

4. Points of Interests Relations with vendors, language barrier Selection process Impact on: User training Copyright and fair use Analytical decision making (e.g. use of usage stats)

5. Methodology Method of data collection: a questionnaire of 20 mostly closed-ended questions Sent by email to 76 institutions Overall return rate: 51% Special libraries, underrepresented in the sample and excluded from the analysis

6. Analysis Done in five categories: Respondent Institutions ANKOS Membership Product Selection and English Product Selection and Methods used Miscellaneous

7. Respondent Institutions Pricing of site licensed electronic resources shifts from the use of number of concurrent users to full- time equivalent (FTE) faculty and students. Large institutions pay large subscription fees proportioned to their FTE. Turkish state universities generally have large student bodies. The academic use of English is lower in Turkey.

8. Respondent Institutions, Cont. An alternative definition for FTE: Total number of faculty plus students enrolled in departments where the medium of instruction is English State Universities Foundation Universities Mean FTE10,989.582,500 Instruction fully in English 8.33%61.53%

9. Respondent Institutions, Cont.

10. Budget allocation for e-resources in 1999- 2002: 66% had an increase of 10% to 450% favoring e-resources budget over print. Remaining 44% is either new institutions or have subscribed e-resources for the 1 st time in 2002. 8 institutions had savings due to print journal cancellations.

11. ANKOS Membership Controversial answers about when they joined ANKOS Could be due to a problem of semantics

12. ANKOS Membership, Cont.

13. Product Selection and English Do libraries with no fluent English speaking acquisitions librarian(s) tend to work with local distributors or with vendors who have Turkish Sales Representative? with qualified librarian + did not matter 64% of Foundation Univ. and 13% of State Univ. without qualified librarian + did not matter 18% of Foundation Univ. and 25% of State Univ.

14. Product Selection and English -Remarks- Other library staff, including the library director may facilitate the communication with foreign vendors. Some institutions marked “did not matter” rather than “other”, although they had no e-resources budget before 2003. 69% of all respondents selected “to avoid one-to- one dialog with vendors” as a reason to join ANKOS.

15. Product Selection and Methods used The prioritized list of methods used in determining products to subscribe to by computed means: 1. Faculty members’ suggestions 2.ANKOS’ announcements 3.Library staff recommendations 4.Vendors’ visits 5.Stands at conferences 6.Library listservs

16. Product Selection and Methods used -Remarks- All state universities and 8 foundation universities announce all of the ANKOS trials. 83% of the respondents collect and analyze user feedback about the trials. Some complained about receiving very little feedback. Only 2 state and 2 foundation universities (the ones who do not announce all trials!) have subscription in 2003 for products that ANKOS tried but could not establish a consortium.

17. Miscellaneous Copyright and fair use: One third of the respondents have a notice on their web page and give instructions to users on this topic. The earliest notice is from 2001 whereas the instructions go back to 1999. The time difference could be due to the fact that print books and journals are subject to fair use as well and that many new libraries had their web site and their first subscriptions lately.

18. Miscellaneous Usage Statistics: 92% of the respondents utilize usage stats for decision making about database subscription and renewals. 10 institutions made cancellations due to low usage. Timely initiative of ANKOS to structure a qualitative model to be shared by member institutions.

19. Miscellaneous Licensing: License agreements with their difficult legal English used to be documents to be signed by all parties without questioning its clauses. Only three respondents asked for amendments. ANKOS now has its model Turkish site license and all contracts are subject to standard examination. Amendments requested, if necessary.

20. Miscellaneous User training: The investment on e-resources must pay the libraries back in terms of high usage which can be promoted by outreaching programs such as user trainings. 81% of the respondents provide training for their subscribed databases. ANKOS’ ongoing initiative about preparing user manuals and database fact sheets will increase this percentage and may bring some standardization to user training programs.

21. Conclusions and Recommendations ANKOS is not just an entity bringing purchasing power together. It supports its members in easing the communication with foreign vendors, in evaluating license agreements, in analyzing usage statistics, in providing user training, etc. Further research probably using focus group technique is needed.

22. THANK YOU takbayturk@ku.edu.tr