Prior to uploading my Sherlock Holmes syllabus, I double-checked that the various book-chapters I assigned last time I taught the course were still alive and kicking. Er. Well. One of them was still around, although it had moved to an entirely different eBooks collection (presumably, some buying and selling had gone on); the other, though, had vanished to wherever eBooks vanish when your library subscription changes.
Sigh.
Of course, print books are deaccessioned all the time, or damaged, or stolen, or what-have-you. But this kind of instability is not workable in the longterm for building a good collection. It's all the more frustrating because at an institution like mine, eBook collections initially seemed to promise a considerable expansion of our library's reach: oh, hey, there's that cool monograph that we can't really afford in hard copy! Instead, though, we have this unpredictable cycling of books in and out. That something "exists online" has nothing to do with our ability to access it reliably, or even access it at all.
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