Demand-Driven Acquisitions
All the Basic Options
Abstract
Starting a new demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) program or assessment strategy can be overwhelming. There are a variety of options to consider and often a variety of different user groups to serve. This chapter outlines the basic formats of DDA plans from formalizing in-person suggestions to harnessing the power of use towards catalog-integrated ebook DDA. This chapter also compares DDA strategies to other acquisitions strategies to determine whether DDA is the right program for the goals and needs of your library and hone in on the most popular method of DDA, catalog-integrated ebook programs, to help determine the best options for mediation, setting up the profile, and what you should expect to see during the pilot.
Keywords
Demand-driven acquisitions; interlibrary loan-to-purchase; patron suggestion; pay-per-view; books; ebooks; assessment; vendor relations; program comparisons; ebook packages; approval plans; mediation
There are many things to consider when starting a demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) program or beginning to assess an existing DDA program. The first of these considerations might be the type of DDA purchasing and the format of the purchase. Catalog-integrated ebook DDA, the process of loading prepurchase catalog records into the library system that are automatically purchased based on user activity, is one of the most popular and studied methods of DDA, but there are many other formats. These include DDA programs that rely on explicit patron requests, like interlibrary loan to purchase programs and “you ask, we buy” programs popular across libraries of all types. There are also demand-informed programs like evidence-based selection which lets libraries purchase a sum that they have pledged based on user activity in exchange for the period of free use that generates that activity and subscription renewals or cancellations based on usage. There are also options for demand-driven access that may or may not lead to a perpetual purchase in the form of pay-per-view or short-term loans. Evidence-based selection is similar to DDA in that publishers load a large pool of discovery records into the catalog, but instead of usage triggering short-term loans or purchases right away, instead the library looks at their usage of the titles and decides what to purchase from the collection based on an established minimum purchase (Machovec, 2013).
Most of these types of purchases can work with different formats including paper and digital books, film, articles, journals, and databases. There are many options for vendors and platforms. Some DDA programs are aimed at specific groups or disciplines within the library, while others have a broad focus. There is also the question of mediation to consider. Users might be able to trigger a purchase on their own or triggers may be reviewed by a librarian before purchase. Some programs use both of these options and require librarian mediation for certain item types or purchases above a particular price. Trigger activities must be established and assessed, along with determining whether triggers activate short-term loans or purchases (Way & Garrison, 2011).
There is also the opportunity to assess or preassess the appropriateness of DDA as an acquisitions strategy by comparing it to other methods of obtaining the same material. Luckily, there are a number of models and a good base of research that can help us craft assessments for each of these components of the DDA process. Libraries serve their communities by creating better collections. Assessment and mindful collection building improves the quality of collections and helps us serve our communities more effectively (Walters, 2012). DDA can be a part of this process, but finding the right method and format for each library is a process. This chapter will help lay out the options and give some examples of libraries that have used them to help clarify the immense diversity of DDA programs and help librarians determine the right options for their institution and goals. If you are just getting started with ebook DDA, the the LITA Guide, Getting Started with Demand-Driven Acquisitions for E-books (Arndt, 2015) is also a great resource that outlines a step-by-step approach to setting up each of these options according to your program goals.
When the University of California Irvine (UCI) first started their ebook DDA program in 2009, vendors were still figuring out how this type of program would work. The University looked at four different providers that were willing to work with them to develop DDA programs and the school had specific goals in mind which helped craft their program. Robert Johnson, Clinical Services Librarian at UCI said of the experience, “the most important thing an organization can do prior to investigating these models is to determine what it wants out of PDA” (Johnson, 2011). Certainly this is good advice for any library seeking to begin a DDA trial or an assessment program; measures of cost, electronic collection goals, and the workflow of both acquisitions and interlibrary loan should be examined carefully and goals determined before the trial or the assessment of the program begins.
Some institutions find that a single method for DDA works best for them, but others juggle a number of different strategies at once. Brigham Young University has five different patron-driven models that are used to acquire both ebooks and physical books:
1. Faculty expedited orders, which are purchased through the website and sent directly to purchase without mediation through librarians.
2. Suggest-a-book, through which students and other users can request books via a link on the library website. These requests are sent to a selector librarian who decides whether they should be purchased.
3. Interlibrary loan to purchase, nonfiction interlibrary loan requests under $50 for students and $80 for faculty and staff are considered for purchase instead of loan.
4. Holds queue materials are sent to subject selectors once they have three simultaneous holds, the subject selector decides whether additional copies should be purchased.
These strategies all serve different needs in the community and have different costs and benefits (Schroeder, 2012). Most libraries will not need to establish programs with this much complexity, but Brigham Young University provides a good example of how the different DDA strategies can work together to serve a wide variety of users and needs. The different DDA strategies have a range of setup, mediation, and assessment considerations. The first DDA strategies to emerge were likely those that recycled existing patron activity into evidence of demand. This includes “you ask, we buy” programs which rely on patrons asking in-person or virtually for specific titles and interlibrary loan-to-purchase programs.
Researchers at Dundee University Library found evidence that librarians have been looking at interlibrary loan in hopes that it could inform purchasing since the early 1960s. During their own period of increasing interlibrary loan, the idea began to emerge that this activity was an indicator of unmet demand in the community for resources. Nearly 74% of their interlibrary loan requests between 1980 and 1981 were made up of monographs that were available for purchase commercially and half of these had been published within the past 6 years. They also found that the rate of interlibrary loan requests in each discipline represented the size of the corresponding departments fairly well (Roberts & Cameron, 1984). This type of correlation represents a low-hanging fruit for collection development and allows libraries to fulfill in print or digital, keep a close eye on the budget, and mediate at the request level to ensure that collection goals are met.
Since this study was published, interlibrary loan-to-purchase programs have spread to many libraries including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which began an interlibrary loan-to-purchase program in 2000, with an initial pledge amount of $5000. This program set up parameters for which loans were purchased. Items were sent to the purchase queue only if they had been unable to loan the item from five libraries, they were published in the past 5 years, they were not textbooks or computer manuals, they cost below $250 and they were available from online booksellers. They included foreign language imprints and additional copies of high-use materials already in the collection. Their restrictions were fairly significant, so in the first 2 years of the program they purchased 135 titles. These requests were overwhelmingly from faculty and graduate students (91%). Seventy-three percent of the items had subsequent circulations by the end of the 2 years (Allen, Ward, Wray, & Debus-Lopez, 2003).
Suzanne M. Ward, Tanner Wray, and Karl E. Debus-López compared the program at Wisconsin-Madison to one at Purdue University Libraries. Wisconsin’s program had a modest budget and a high level of technical services mediation, while Purdue had a larger budget with a lower level of technical services involvement. Patrons were made aware of the program at Purdue but not at Wisconsin, and Purdue used a single online bookseller for the requests while Wisconsin used multiple vendors. Both programs found that DDA was particularly effective for acquiring books in the humanities and less effective for the sciences, though they thought that this might be because STEM fields put more emphasis on journal literature. They also both found that interlibrary loan-to-purchase was a good strategy for patron satisfaction and collection development (Ward, Wray, & Debus-López, 2003). This study represents a thorough description of how libraries can right size their interlibrary loan-to-purchase processes to work with their budgets and comfort level. Purdue’s program shows an example of criteria for purchase created by collection development librarians that was fully mediated by support staff, while Wisconsin’s program involved professional staff at all levels.
Virginia Tech began an interlibrary loan-to-purchase program in 2013 to reduce the number of interlibrary loan requests that were being canceled because they could not be filled through regular borrowing. They had switched over to an e-preferred policy in 2012. Purchase on demand was already the standard, though it was informal in many departments. They formalized this process for articles and books that they could not obtain through interlibrary loan (Lener & Brown, 2015). This example represents a small tweak to their process which resulted in a greater completion rate for these requests and the addition of materials that are potentially useful for others in their community.
Critiques of interlibrary loan-to-purchase programs, like Gerrit van Dyk’s 2011 article, Interlibrary Loan Purchase-on-Demand: A Misleading Literature, point out the hidden costs of this type of acquisition strategy. In most library workflows, a DDA request that travels from the interlibrary loan department through acquisitions and circulation impacts far more workflows than regular interlibrary loan or acquisitions requests. van Dyk estimates that at Brigham Young University, interlibrary loan-to-purchase requests would need to circulate 3–4 times to have a return on investment equivalent to that of a regular interlibrary loan request. That said, only 28% of the items purchased during Brigham Young’s interlibrary loan-to-purchase trial clearly had a lower return on investment than interlibrary loan. Tweaks to library workflows and unbundling strong departmentalization in libraries could have helped reduce this number further. The importance of setting good limits for purchasing caps is even more significant than setting these same caps up for unmediated DDA programs because there are some expensive items that will never be cost-effective to purchase even if they circulate many times (van Dyk, 2011). This is unique to each institution and the size of their program.
Libraries that are part of a consortium can also use interlibrary loan-to-purchase to obtain items they cannot easily borrow. One of the criteria that the University at Buffalo established in their interlibrary loan-to-purchase program excluded from purchase any materials already owned by Buffalo or any of the shared collections accessible through Buffalo (Booth & O’Brien, 2011). They also established a “parasitic” interlibrary loan-to-purchase program with one of their consortial partners, Empire State College. Empire State students and faculty were able to request items from the University at Buffalo via interlibrary loan. Buffalo had an interlibrary loan-to-purchase program that meant that if Empire State users requested an item they did not have, they would purchase it and when it was returned it would become part of Buffalo’s collections. There’s no subsequent circulation data, but the program was well received by patrons at Empire State and Buffalo felt that the items purchased through the program were valuable for their collection (Bertuca et al., 2009).
In addition to interlibrary loan requests, analyzing the hold shelf can also be an effective method for libraries looking to adopt patron-driven practices. Libraries should be looking for different kinds of patron indicators to drive their collection strategy and holds can be a simple way to do this. Brigham Young University found that many of the books that were purchased through this method were difficult to obtain via interlibrary loan and when they purchased additional copies the cost per use of those copies was extremely low, in the $1–2 range. They began a policy to purchase titles once they acquired four holds at any time. They conducted a kind of peer interlibrary loan analysis on these materials and also found that other libraries often requested these items via interlibrary loan. There was such a correlation between these hold shelf acquisitions and interlibrary loan requests from other institutions that they had to create a policy to restrict lending of these items to their own patrons (Van Dyk, 2014).
Data for use-based acquisitions can also come from unexpected places. The University of California, Santa Barbara, introduced a collection development element into their library instruction. They designed particular graduate credit-bearing courses in discipline-specific research areas. This course was meant to be paired with a research-heavy major course so that students could use the research techniques they were learning to produce real research. At the end of the term, once students had done specific research in their field, the librarian teaching the course assigned them a dollar amount to “spend” on research materials. If students chose to duplicate titles already held in the collection they had to justify those purchases. Then the library actually purchased the materials. They found that this was a good form of outreach, students liked to see the materials they had selected on the shelves, and it was also a great way to do patron-driven predictive purchasing. Doctoral students provided a window into the kind of research the faculty of the future would be doing. The librarian in charge of the program, Anne Barnhart, noted that the students in Spanish and Portuguese selected materials about film, particularly Spanish film noir and literary adaptations and these same trends had started to emerge when she followed up at the book fairs in Guadalajara and Buenos Aires (Barnhart, 2010).
This strategy was also used in the reverse at the State University of New York Maritime University. Rebecca Hyams and Kristin Har presented on an instruction-driven patron-driven weeding program at the 2016 Metropolitan New York Library Council Conference. They gave free reign of their aging collection to information literacy students and asked them to find the most outdated book they could on the shelf. Then they weeded the results (Hyams & Har, 2016). This gave their students a sense of ownership over the library as well as helping with their ongoing weeding program.
DDA programs do not always have to be about print materials. Kanopy is coming up as a major vendor of streaming video DDA for academic libraries and Hoopla does a similar program aimed at public libraries (Kenney, 2013). Both of these tools offer competitive service agreements that let students access the entire catalog of content with purchases on triggers similar to monograph DDA. The experience is seamless so users do not know that they are triggering purchases. McGill offers a DDA program for audiobooks also aimed at public libraries (Lannon & McKinnon, 2013). These tools are a way to diversify collections using DDA philosophy. They prioritize immediate and full access to tools, competitive rates, and in-platform streaming so the experience is as seamless for users and reasonable for libraries as possible.
Jesse Koennecke, Director of Acquisitions and E-Resource Licensing Services, Cornell University; Susan Marcin, Head of E-Resources Management: Technologies & User Experience, Columbia University; and Matthew Pavlick, Head, Monographs Acquisitions Services, Columbia University Libraries presented at the 2014 Charleston Conference on acquiring and managing streaming video content at Cornell and Columbia University Libraries. Columbia had a strategy and fund code for purchasing and hosting course reserves streaming on demand (Chua, 2015). DDA media materials have some unique characteristics like trigger periods, Kanopy offers a pretty generous level of use before purchase is triggered, but assessing these programs will take into consideration many of the same factors one would consider when assessing any DDA program.
One of these considerations might be deciding whether to access or own materials. We can trace the idea of access over ownership back as far as the Farmington Plan, which, in 1942 proposed a consortium that would obtain a copy of every title that might be of interest to research in America and that they would share these titles in an interlibrary loan agreement and thus provided a full suite of resources for every researcher served by one of the member libraries. Since the Farmington Plan, information has expanded exponentially and now the idea that any number of libraries might be able to create a comprehensive collection of the world’s resources seems difficult. The idea of access over ownership has become more palatable in recent years with increasing costs and expanding research areas, but this strategy is very hard to predict. Our ideas about budgets and our expectations of use need to be adjusted for this new world. A good strategy for this might be access-informed collection development, in which the library can use the information we have to determine whether to purchase or access any given item. Interlibrary loan provides particularly fruitful data for this, because it reveals potential unmet demands in the collection. Subject analysis of these materials compared with holdings and circulation data can help determine whether collections are too big or small and whether they address the needs of actual researchers in the community (Mortimore, 2006).
Another significant question is, should we be buying at all? Many programs have used short term loans to great effect and have saved quite a lot of money in the process (Radnor & Shrauger, 2012). For many libraries and librarians, building a collection is still a significant part of what they consider to be their roles, but this idea might shift as materials become more readily and immediately available. Resource delivery without purchase is more and more common in libraries, and though this is associated with DDA in many programs, it could have the potential to become a bigger part of library workflow. Once the majority of resources are within instant electronic reach we will need to rethink the idea of building collections or struggle with the concept of not building them. Libraries have experimented with many new and changing roles since the Farmington Plan, and it is likely that our needs and resources will continue to change.
The good news is that even though DDA programs sometimes reduce the amount of time librarians spend as selectors, this process only relocates work from prepurchase selection to postpurchase assessment (De Fino & Lo, 2011). Nowhere is this clearer than in the literature on patron-driven pay-per-view programs for electronic journal articles. This process predates the boom in ebook DDA programs, but definitely refocuses librarians from making 1-yearly serials purchase to analyzing a constantly flowing stream of request data. As institutions faced financial burdens in 2008–09, unbundling from large package deals in journal content became an attractive option and database and journal vendors were established enough in the e-content market that they were able to offer DDA pay-per-view programs at the point of need, though the same response for the ebook market took a few more years to develop. Using pay-per-view, demand-driven solutions can save money over package database pricing and can provide access to a wide range of materials, even if that access is not permanent (Levine-Clark, 2014).
Much like DDA for books, pay-per-view purchasing of articles is a diverse landscape. When librarians from the University of Nevada, Reno, were planning their approach to article pay-per-view, they examined several different mediation options for this content including a patron-driven token system where affiliated users could “buy” access to articles using a prepaid credit through the library, a registration-based patron-driven token system where users had to create accounts to be able to do this, and a fully mediated system in which interlibrary loan staff would be responsible for purchasing articles using tokens and delivering them to patrons (Fisher, Kurt, & Gardner, 2012).
All of these options are still available and popular methods for article pay-per-view and often, token programs and unmediated pay-per-view programs are tied to individual publishers. This was shown to be the case when Patrick L. Carr interviewed with six institutions that had already started or were in the process of planning pay-per-view models for academic articles. The institutions reported that they were interested in pay-per-view as a way to save costs and expand access to a wider range of journals, but Carr observed a wide diversity in the types and contracts of programs. Two of the programs he surveyed restricted access to faculty only, three allowed students to access with or without a message cautioning them to use the service responsibly, and one allowed students to use it only if they received prior approval from a faculty member. Integrating these programs was generally not difficult on an administrative level though it did make costs unpredictable. They also noted that the many different platforms for access made if difficult for users to understand (Carr & Collins, 2009).
These administrative challenges can be eased by mediated programs like the Copyright Clearance Center’s Get it Now program, which allows libraries to provide a direct-to-user article delivery service that utilizes ILLiad or email to deliver the journal article to the user. This system does not add the article to the library’s permanent collection, but allows libraries to provide instant access for users at a lower cost and quick turnaround time. Materials are delivered and controlled through the existing interlibrary loan workflow.
ReadCube is another software that makes purchasing article-level content seamless. The platform is built around organizing the content that the library already has access to, but also acts as a discovery layer for library and nonlibrary content. ReadCube allows for content rental as well and it is very reasonably priced. The University of Utah embarked on a trial with ReadCube in 2013 and found that for some content, particularly expensive science journals, ReadCube was the most cost effective method for obtaining these items as long as demand was relatively steady (England & Anderson, 2013; England & Jones, 2014). These services are best used in a library environment that already takes a demand-driven philosophy toward serials. Because of the changing nature of access to these publications, faculty recommended reading or a single blockbuster article can strongly affect usage patterns from year to year. The good news is that turnaround time for journal orders is quicker than ever, so libraries can now quickly adapt based on demand as long as there is a constant and detailed examination of usage patterns and turnaways. Tools like Get It Now and ReadCube can help fill the gap in serials planning. It is no longer necessary for librarians to attempt to predict the year’s usage at the beginning of a subscription period because statistics are more accessible than ever and channels for access have increased.
Patron-driven collection development policies on an annual renewal scale are still difficult to pull off because the time needed to negotiate and set up journal- and database-level acquisitions is still slow and the problem of unpredictable spending is emphasized, but this is an area for innovation and many libraries are using access data to inform purchases and cancellations during annual renewals. Pay-per-view is a stopgap for fulfilling these types of needs, but it is likely that the idea of setting a suite of subscriptions up and being able to forget them until the end of the fiscal year is becoming a less realizable move for libraries.
DDA programs can be very diverse. Using patron requests and interest to drive purchasing through interlibrary loan-to-purchase programs, request forms, or a formalization of protocol when patrons make requests through other means, and instruction-integrated requests can all be effective ways to connect to patrons and deliver the materials that are important to them. DDA programs can also be diverse in format and encompass articles, media, and other materials not traditionally acquired through the libraries. There is a lot we can learn from assessing these other types of DDA programs alongside catalog-integrated ebook DDA programs and these strategies represent ways that institutions can experiment with DDA in controlled, comfortable ways.
2.1 How Does DDA Stack Up to Other Strategies?
This section will consider some of the other options that libraries have for ebook purchasing. These strategies are important to consider in ebook DDA assessments, because they give the clearest contrast between circulations. Often vendors offer ebook licenses using a variety of strategies including firm order, packages, and DDA. This is an advantage for those assessing DDA programs because they are able to study the method of acquisition while isolating other factors like how easy the platform is to use, whether there are barriers for users discovering the records, and how the data are gathered and presented.
The most common comparisons for ebook DDA programs is ebook packages and single title purchase ebook content. Ebook packages are preselected groups of titles that libraries either purchase for a flat fee or subscribe annually to access. Librarians do not have control over the titles in the collection and libraries might find, as Julia Proctor at the University of Wyoming did, that many of the items in package collections duplicated their print collections. Proctor cautioned that it might be tempting for libraries to attempt to use these backlist packages to replace backlist print and free up collection space, but libraries should be aware that even with perpetual access rights, ebook purchases are access leases, not firm guarantees. If publishers would be prepared to pony up preservation copies which could be stored locally or some other guarantee, it would be a lot more comfortable for many libraries to purchase these materials. There are several grassroots initiatives to work towards this like LOCKSS/CLOCKSS (https://www.clockss.org/clockss/Home), the Charlotte Initiative (Hamaker, 2016), and Portico (http://www.portico.org/digital-preservation/).
Proctor also cautions that ebook packages are similar to journal content “big deal” packages because they incentivize low-value backlist content with a small percentage of front list titles. This may not be an issue for many libraries, because these packages make a lot of content available at a very low cost per use. However, this is often because of a small percentage of hyperused titles. Many libraries also purchase single title ebook content through selectors or approvals (Proctor, 2013). Ebook packages work well for many libraries, though they may have little control over the platforms users have to navigate to access these materials, the possibility that they will have to create external accounts with the vendor, and the loan rules or circulation policies of the vendor.
It is possible to overcome these barriers and work with ebook platforms to ensure that users are able to access and enjoy ebooks, even when they come from packages. The University of Liverpool Library described a very positive introduction to ebook collecting when they began subscribing to Ebrary’s Academic Complete Collection in 2006. Their community demanded more ebook access and they provided it in the form of single title purchases, but users were confused by different access policies (Bucknell, 2012). The University of Liverpool librarians have worked to increase access to ebooks, consistency, and usage through analysis and experimentation that touches on ebook packages of all types. The popularity of ebook packages means there is a lot of good data and research into these materials and a lot to learn about DDA programs through examining these other methods for obtaining ebook content. One of the most revealing and comprehensive studies of ebook content is Michael Levine-Clark’s research into Ebrary and EBL records.
Levine-Clark examined the usage of 640,000 ebook title records from Ebrary and 375,000 records from EBL across their worldwide customers to determine patterns of usage for ebooks. These ebooks span many different acquisitions strategies including DDA, single title purchases, and package purchases. The ebooks in both collections were fairly evenly divided between STEM subjects, arts and humanities, and social sciences, though they were skewed towards particular fields and varied slightly in their proportions. Levine-Clark used a four-step approach to evaluate the usage of ebooks: usage compared on the spectrum of all the titles available, the usage patterns within one session, the usage of the top 10% of titles, and the intensive and extensive use of titles within particular LC classes. He found that social science titles were the most likely to be used overall. He found differences in usage across countries, primarily that in Africa, Latin America, Middle East, South Asia, and Asia Pacific a smaller percentage of accessible titles were viewed and during sessions there were fewer pages viewed and less time spent on pages than users in North America, Australia and New Zealand, The United Kingdom and Ireland, and Europe. He also found that downloading was more common in countries without stable internet infrastructure. He also analyzed how broad the usage was and how deep it was, some subject areas had both broad and deep usage including education and the fine arts. Other subjects, like language and literature, had deep usage of a narrower group of titles (Levine-Clark, 2015).
Overall, Levine-Clark found that Ebrary’s collection had a 97.27% baseline view rate for all its titles, while EBL had 66.76%. He also found that readers used ebooks in expected ways: reference materials had infrequent, deep use, history had the longest uses, and technology books had the highest number of pages turned in a short time (Levine-Clark, Paulson, & Moeller, 2015). As we begin to discuss usage, this is an important point. For print materials we are working with a broad criterion, circulations, which leaves a lot of information out of usage. Circulation data appear the same to libraries regardless of whether the book sat under the patron’s bed or was read cover to cover. Levine-Clark finds that there are distinct differences between usage types in books and that these correlate to disciplines. The collections that Levine-Clark used also contained download data, which can be a black box for researchers. The percentage of downloaded ebooks that are successfully read is not something we can see from vendor data.
Researchers from Texas A&M University Libraries conducted a study into a discipline-specific ebook package to investigate the ways different users interacted with the system. They evaluated the resource PsycBOOKS to determine what kind of use it was getting and whether it was a useful resource for their community. As in the University of Wyoming study, they expected that many of the titles in the PsycBOOKS collection duplicated print and they were able to create a duplicate list to compare usage in this package to print circulations. They generated a list of 1391 titles that were held in both book database and print formats. They then looked at usage data for these collections. Between 2000 and 2014, 79% of the print titles circulated and 51% circulated three or more times, but they found that this proportion shrank over time. In 2014 only 56% of print titles circulated. The use of print titles in this pool by graduate and undergraduate students declined quickly between 2000 and 2014, while the use by faculty stayed steadier though their print usage also declined. Only 28% of the ebooks in the duplicate pool had been accessed, but the access rate was similar across format types for books that had been used: ebooks received 6.26 uses per item, while print materials received 6.95 uses per item (Ramirez & Tabacaru, 2015).
The McGill University Library also conducted a single discipline study, this time of business titles and using cross-provider ebook data from collections that had been developed in different ways. They used data from Ebrary, NetLibrary, and SpringerLink in a business school setting rather than looking at ebook usage across disciplines. They focused in on a year of lending from August 2010 to August 2011, but also used data from the lifetime of their subscriptions to each vendor. The most broadly used collection was NetLibrary at 25% followed by SpringerLink at 15%. Only 2% of Ebrary titles were used during the focal year. Of these titles, SpringerLink titles were accessed an average of 10 times, Ebrary’s offerings were accessed an average of five times, and NetLibrary’s were accessed an average of three times. This means that though NetLibrary had the broadest usage of the publishers, it was not deep usage. Ebrary had very narrow usage, but that usage was comparatively deep. NetLibrary’s offerings were selected by librarians because they were often used in courses and as a result they found this collection had many turnaways in a small percentage of the collection and low use percentages. Eleven of the titles in these collections had over 100 turnaways each. SpringerLink titles were purchased through an approval plan and Ebrary’s were acquired as ebook packages. Ninety-seven percent of McGill’s Ebrary business titles had not been used, but the usage they did have was fairly deep. Both package titles and approval plan showed narrow but deep uses of collections, meaning that a small percentage of titles were accessed, but those that were had significant use (Lannon & McKinnon, 2013).
Similarly, Grand Valley State University found that only 11% of their Ebrary package titles were used each year (Way & Garrison, 2011). These studies bring up a question of modern collection development. Is it advisable or even permissible to keep low-use ebook titles in the collection as part of a package “just in case” or does it make sense to “develop” the collection by removing these titles from the pool? Titles that are available both as single-purchase ebooks and as part of a package as is the case with many of Ebrary’s titles opens up another possibility for libraries to assess package usage and then buy the most frequently used titles while letting the rest of the package expire.
The University of Florida compared ebook packages and DDA across different disciplines and found that across the board, ebook packages generated about 50% use, but a low cost per use because there were high-impact publications in package ebook collections. They spent the most on STEM collections; their total spending was $262,755.73, but the cost per use was only $3.61. Medicine titles had an even better cost per use with total spending at $65,079.52 and cost per use at $2.44. They decided that package purchasing was a good strategy for their STEM and medicine collections because it offered deep usage with low institutional overhead. They chose a combination of DDA and demand inspired firm ordering for their humanities ebooks because those package collections had a higher cost per use (Carrico, Cataldo, Botero, & Shelton, 2015). Packages or a combination of packages and DDA can be a good strategy for libraries, but analyzing these collections for their costs and benefits is essential. What works for one department’s resources might not work for another department.
Researchers from the University of Idaho found much broader usage across the board for their ebook packages, only 20% of titles had never been accessed. Their cost per use for the collection was also very low at $3.67 (Sprague & Hunter, 2008). Institutional expenditures per volume for package collections, like selection and cataloging, are also very low per title and per use. These ebook packages might have a tendency to fill the collection with a percentage of unused titles, but the advantages to adding them might outweigh the challenges depending on the goals of the institution.
There are many questions surrounding the purchase and ownership of ebook packages. Cost per use, for instance, is a very different matter when comparing perpetual-access ebooks like firm orders and continuing or subscription access materials. For subscription materials, libraries must calculate the accumulated expenditure since the start of the subscription or purchases divided by the accumulated usage and begin this cycle anew with each payment cycle. Many institutions calculate cost per use at a yearly rate for continuing subscriptions. As annual contributions continue, the potential for cost per use to increase or decline significantly is smaller and smaller because it is falling into an increasingly large pool of usages and costs. For perpetual access titles, the cost per use will only go down, but circulations tend to decrease as an item ages (Bucknell, 2012).
Many institutions use ebook packages and find that they offer low cost per use and low institutional overhead. Purchasing ebooks directly from publishers can amplify this advantage for libraries and is also worth investigating (Duan & Grace, 2013). Working with publishers directly can give libraries more freedom to negotiate for price, especially if they are negotiating as part of a consortium.
As we saw from the comparison studies at institutions like McGill University, approval plans and packages can have narrow usage across a small percentage of titles. This is in line with what we know about print approval plans as well. As early as 1979, studies from print show a low usage rate for approval plan titles (Wenger, Sweet, & Stiles, 1979). Yet approval plans persisted for many years because they offered a way for libraries to acquire a lot of content at once with very little meditation on the part of librarians. DDA offers many of the same benefits as approval plans and potentially fewer drawbacks. Many libraries move from approval programs to DDA programs and use their existing approval plan profiles to generate their DDA discovery pool (Roll, 2014).
Loyola Marymount University investigated this potential in great detail when the librarians there sought to reform their approval plan for a DDA world. They still wanted to use the expertise of their liaisons and maintain approvals though they had adopted a DDA program which covered a lot of what their approval plan used to do. They had 22 librarians engaged in collection development through liaison programs, but this was not a primary responsibility for most of them. They were able to reform the approval plan, and used it to create a more powerful DDA profile that was able to more comprehensively represent the goals of their liaison librarians while still functioning as a hands-off strategy for content acquisitions (Hillen, Johnson-Grau, & Thompson, 2014).
Package deals and approval plans can both be advantageous strategies for libraries and more importantly for our purposes, assessing these collections can be fundamental for laying out the parameters for DDA programs and for assessing the effectiveness of DDA programs. Approval plans often provide a first, good platform for the discovery pools of new DDA programs, but as Loyola Marymount University researchers found, these plans can be honed and adapted to serve the DDA strategy even better. Considering the landscape of ebook acquisitions and all different acquisitions types in DDA assessment can help researchers set good institutional benchmarks and have collections that are useful for comparison.
2.2 Figuring Out the Program
Once an institution decides to begin a new catalog-integrated ebook DDA program or assess one of these programs, it is important to figure out the basic options for these programs and how they might affect spending, access, and purchasing. Creating a discovery profile, setting a budget, setting up the trigger protocol, deciding whether to mediate purchases, and deciding how users should be able to interact with materials can influence the types of materials that are purchased through DDA programs and how they are received by patrons. Goals, policies, and strategies for assessment should be developed early and revisited often. Many libraries take on catalog-integrated DDA programs as a way to grow their digital collections, reduce spending on approval plans, deal with shrinking budgets, and increase access. Clearly articulated goals for the program and good assessment strategies can help ensure that programs meet these goals.
The goal of librarians at the University of Arizona was to increase access to digital collections for their growing distance student population. The institution had supported a digital-first acquisitions policy for several years before they adopted their catalog-integrated ebook DDA program. Librarians worked to set up a program by setting up a profile of core materials within the scope of their disciplines and from their approval plan profiles. They set up this strategy as digital first, but with the opportunity for print when an ebook version was not available. To assess this program, the university looked at program data, analyzed trends in patron selection, and gathered patron feedback. They were particularly interested in cost per title, the percentage of selected titles in their discovery records, and the circulations of each title (Jones, 2011).
There is a lot to learn about organizing DDA programs from the University of Arizona example. It is easy to see how the goal of increasing access to digital collections is served by a catalog-integrated DDA program. The other important thing to recognize is the way their assessment goals and areas address their collection goals. Because their aim was to serve students better with their collections, so addressing this through percentage of triggered titles and student surveys was important for their process. Institutions that have a bigger focus on budget or workflow might analyze factors like cost per use or expenditure per volume when assessing DDA activity. Building goals and assessment strategies into the planning process of DDA can help clarify the setup process. The next section of this volume will address five areas of assessment in detail, with examples from the research, but first we will go into a few details of the DDA setup process with attention to how these details affect the way DDA programs develop.
The vendor that an institution chooses for DDA will depend on factors like the market at the time and the goals and budget of the program. Jill Emery and Graham Stone prepared a comprehensive checklist for Library Technology Reports which details an ideal structure of decision making when identifying a vendor for digital subscriptions or methods. Their method begins with identifying the content or content groups that the library needs and then determining which provider offers the best selection of these resources. The next step in the process is determining the limiters of the purchase. Limiters might include groups that are served or excluded from particular programs, the focus disciplines for the resource, and the way materials are triggered. Emery and Stone then recommend investigating the vendors that best fit your program more deeply with trials and extensive comparisons, before making a choice (Emery & Stone, 2013). Electronic purchases and programs are costly decisions for any library so focused and organized decision making at the beginning of the process is necessary to reach the goal benchmarks of the program.
One of the first considerations when starting a catalog-integrated DDA program is figuring out the records that will fall into the discovery profile. The number of records in the discovery profile can have a big impact on initial spending in the program, but the way this happens is different for each institution. Below we will examine a few catalog-integrated ebook DDA program cases from institutions of all sizes.
Stetson University served around 3756 students in 2010 (Stetson University, 2011) when they conducted a year-long DDA trial with an initial profile of 3300 records and purchased 85 titles for $5624.00. During the first 2 months of the program, October–December 2010, 23 titles were purchased. 28 titles were purchased between January 2010 and March 2011. The remaining months from April 2011 to October 2011 saw 34 purchases, with triggers slowing significantly during the summer months (Dinkins, 2012).
Loyola Marymount University has about 7800 students and began their DDA program in 2011 with 26,500 titles. They experienced steady and consistent purchasing over their 6-month trial. Users purchased approximately 12 titles per week at an average cost of $77 per title (Hillen & Johnson-Grau, 2011).
The University of Vermont, which enrolled approximately 13,554 students at the time this article was published (The University of Vermont Office of Institutional Research, 2010) rolled their approval plan into a catalog-integrated ebook DDA program in 2009. The first year they added 1759 discovery records and triggered 505 titles and the second year they added 1502 discovery records and triggered 590 titles (Spitzform, 2011).
The Ohio State University Libraries serve 63,200 students and started a DDA program in 2009 with 93,000 discovery records. Users purchased an average of 12 titles per day. They had hoped to conduct an 18-week trial, but their $25,000 deposit was spent in 4 weeks (Hodges et al., 2010).
The University of Iowa found that as they accumulated more and more discovery records over 4 years, their rate of expenditure per month increased, nearly doubling from year 1 to year 4 (Fischer & Diaz, 2014).
These case studies are all from very different libraries and show the diversity of discovery pools in academic libraries. Researchers from Kent State University Libraries found that usage of ebooks was more significant when users searched the bibliographic catalog for particular books (Urbano et al., 2015). This might mean that libraries should use larger discovery pools if they are hoping for deep ebook use, if users are searching for particular titles, it might be good to provide them. Approval plans are a commonly used strategy to create discovery pools (Roll, 2014), but these can be adapted and increased for use in DDA. Charles Hillen and Glenn Johnson-Grau from Loyola Marymount University and Joan Thompson from YBP Library Services have a great article published in the Charleston Conference Proceedings 2013 about this subject called Rebuilding the Plane While Flying: Library/Vendor Strategies for Approval Plan Revision (in a DDA World). Libraries interested in reworking their approval profiles so that they will work seamlessly with DDA programs will find some good working knowledge and best practices for how this can be done (Hillen et al., 2014).
Another question that libraries often face when embarking on DDA programs is whether to mediate purchases that users have triggered. The decision of whether to mediate DDA programs is complex and may be different for each institution. Demand-driven strategies emerged in an environment of intense meditation, from “you ask, we buy” programs in public libraries that were each individually assessed by a librarian before being added to the collection (Rawlinson, 1981), to the academic library’s answer to this, interlibrary loan-to-purchase programs. This strategy of using interlibrary loan figures to inform purchasing began to emerge in the 1980s (Byrd, Thomas, & Hughes, 1982) and through the 1990s purchasing began to move quickly enough that collection developers could bypass the interlibrary loan and move straight to purchase with appropriate requests (Perdue & Fleet, 1999). Ward’s 2003 article describes that this process took on a life of its own, with many institutions moving to an interlibrary loan-to-purchase strategy as a matter of course without going back to record or analyze statistics from the program as an acquisitions strategy (Ward et al., 2003). These programs were not without controversy, the level of mediation from librarians and the increased workload for catalogers and processing staff was significant.
Mediation can be costly, but for some institutions there are reasons to engage with it. The “bananas” story from the Charleston Conference in 2008 in which an early adopter of DDA supposedly reported that, in an effort to find out more about the banana industry for an assignment, students had inadvertently and quickly triggered every book that mentioned bananas in the library’s discovery records is frequently cited as evidence of the potential downfalls of patron-driven acquisitions (Price & McDonald, 2009). The ways around this potential pitfall include curating your discovery pool so that everything in it is a good potential acquisition for the library or control the triggers in some other way. Mediation provides the opportunity to control purchasing after a trigger event by requiring input by librarians or support staff to finalize the purchase.
The other reason that libraries might want to use mediation is to keep an eye on collection balance. Claremont College compared download and online usage data from 11 different libraries supplied by EBL, their aim was to examine the differences in usage, audience, and collection comprehensiveness between ebook package collection titles and patron-selected titles. The data included 28,327 ebooks purchased between 2006 and 2009. They normalized for purchase date within these collections because they found that the length of time a book had been in the collection had a statistically significant effect on usage. They found that user-selected titles were used twice as often as package titles (8.6 and 4.3 times per year, respectively). In addition, user-selected collections had a higher standard deviation, with a percentage of the titles generating extreme use, while package collections had more standardized use throughout. They also found that user-selected titles had a higher diversity of users.
They also looked at collection breakdown by subject area and found that package and user-selected titles were very consistent with the exception of one of the libraries studied in which the package titles skewed towards STEM subjects while user-selected titles were mostly arts and humanities (Price & McDonald, 2009). This could be evidence of unbalanced patron triggering within DDA collections, but either mediation or adjustments to the discovery profile could help correct this issue. Because of restrictive cap prices on ebook discovery records, sometimes STEM titles are left out of discovery pools for some libraries, this phenomenon will be discussed in Part II of this volume.
Many libraries choose to forego mediation in their DDA collections. The Penrose Library at the University of Denver was one of the pioneers of unmediated PDA. In 2010, they adopted a comprehensive PDA program that encompassed both the unmediated purchase of electronic books and discovery records for print-only publications that users could request through catalog searches. The library has been very hands-on about ebooks since the early 2000s and they included ebook and print duplication in their records to give users the option for items that had multiple formats available (Levine-clark, 2010). Mediation can create a barrier for users that can be frustrating. Michael Levine-Clark, librarian at the University of Denver’s Penrose Library, also suggests that downloads might create a barrier like this as well (Levine-Clark et al., 2015). Libraries should carefully consider whether to make downloads a part of their process because they can give users the opportunity to “check out” ebooks for a length of time, but they can also make ebooks unavailable for users that may want to view them and reduce overall usage.
There are many choices that libraries must make when implementing DDA programs and many of these choices can impact outcomes for the program. The size of the discovery pool can impact how quickly books are discovered and how many are triggered. This can also have a big impact on the budget for the program. Mediation can help slow spending, but it is also costly for the institution to maintain. Libraries may also want to limit downloads to increase access to information and reporting, though this can also prevent students from deeper research with the materials because they cannot claim the materials for an extended period of time. The right choices for each of these options depend heavily on the institution and the goals by which the DDA program will be assessed.