Growing competition for libraries
| Pages | 363-367 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07378830110411989 |
| Date | 01 December 2001 |
| Published date | 01 December 2001 |
| Author | Susan Gibbons |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Growing competition for
libraries
Susan Gibbons
Introduction
On January 22, 2001, amid a great media buzz,
Questia opened its doors on a collection of over
35,000 digital books. Troy Williams, CEO and
founder of Questia Media America, Inc.,
dreamed up the idea of a subscription-based,
online digital library after experiencing first
hand the disparities between the libraries of the
poorest and wealthiest higher education
institutions. Questia is meant to be an equalizer,
providing all students, regardless of which
college they enroll, unfettered access to the
same library resources. If Questia reaches its
self-imposed collection goal of 250,000 titles by
2003, then, according to Williams, Questia will
be larger than 80 percent of all US academic
libraries.
Questia digitizes the majority of books and
articles themselves, using XML and complying
with the Open eBook standard. In addition to
the traditional author, title and subject
searches, the entire online library is searchable
at a full-text level. But Questia is more than an
online collection of books and articles, because
it offers a suite of tools to facilitate the writing of
term papers. Backed by significant marketing
research, the Questia online service was
designed to be very appealing to undergraduate
students. But what exactly is in this digital
library, and what can librarians learn from
Questia and similar commercial digital libraries
in order to improve their own services?
Questia's collection
On the whole, Questia pales in comparison to
almost any academic library, both in quantity
and quality. When Questia opened its doors in
January it had a collection of 35,000
monographs, covering 28 social sciences and
humanities fields. An immediate impression of
the collection is that it is quite dated. A random
sampling of 100 monographs had an average
publication date of 1973, with only one title
published after 1999. Although Questia has
attributed the age of its collection to its
emphasis on classic, seminal texts of the
humanities and social sciences, as Mick
O'Leary points out, there can be little
retrospective value to many of the titles
The author
Susan Gibbons is Director, LSTA-funded EBook Evaluation
Project and Digital Initiatives Librarian, University of
Rochester, Rush Rhees Library, New York, USA.
E-mail: sgibbons@rcl.lib.rochester.edu
Keywords
Electronic publishing, Libraries, Online retrieval
Abstract
This article begins with an analysis of Questia's online
collection of digitized books and articles. Although the
collection is not found to be a strong one, Questia's strength
lies in its ability to utilize the digital format to overcome
many of the barriers and inconsistencies that undergraduate
students encounter in a traditional brick-and-mortar aca-
demic library. Librarians can learn a lot from Questia and
perhaps use that knowledge to improve their own services.
Electronic access
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363
Library Hi Tech
Volume 19 .Number 4 .2001 .pp. 363±367
#MCB University Press .ISSN 0737-8831
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