Building on a white paper that will be released in fall 2014, this session will delve deeper into usage data for hundreds of thousands of e-books from ebrary and EBL at institutions worldwide, taking a closer look at the arts and humanities titles in the pool. Long-form scholarship is vital to the humanities, and the value that scholars, students, and librarians in these disciplines place on the monograph has made the transition to e-books more difficult than in the social sciences and STEM disciplines. This vast set of data allows us to examine how humanists at a wide range of libraries have made use of e-books and helps us answer questions about how this transition has impacted the reading habits of these heavy book users. This session will use multiple measures to compare usage in the humanities to other disciplines and will then examine usage more closely in the subject areas that make up the arts and humanities. Attendees will get a picture of humanities e-book usage on a macro level and will get tips on how to use similar methodology to analyze their local collections and compare usage to general patterns. By doing so, librarians can build better collections and better serve their users.
