Counting e-books: excluding free titles

[Moon-Chung, Jennifer Ye]

Hello all,

We’re reviewing how to count e-books for the ARL report and have a question about excluding free volumes (or titles). In Alma Analytics (We’re an Alma institution), we noticed the “Portfolio.Free” field in the E-Inventory subject area, but it doesn’t seem reliable. Some collections we actively manage and pay for are marked as “Free”, and we assume the opposite might be true too.

How do you all approach this? What best practices do you use to make sure large sets of free e-books aren’t accidentally included in your ARL counts?

Thank you,

Jenn

Jennifer Ye Moon-Chung, M.Ed., MLIS 

She/Her

Assessment Coordinator 

University of Pittsburgh Library System 

240B Hillman Library

3960 Forbes Avenue 

Pittsburgh, PA 15260

Email: jy...@pitt.edu