A Climate of Demand
Abstract
This chapter describes the conditions that produced demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) in libraries, from the collection assessment literature produced in the 1960s and 1970s to the emerging ebook research in the early 2000s. Budget changes for libraries and significant disruptions to the way information is produced, published, and distributed created a climate ready to experiment and accept a radical change in the way libraries build collections for users. This chapter discusses the particularities of the changing relationship between libraries and publishers and goes on to describe several changes that may become part of the future of DDA.
Keywords
Demand-driven acquisitions; research; ebooks; publishers; publishing; libraries; discovery platforms; budget; mobile devices; assessment; serials; monographs; future planning; trends in acquisition
The fiscal troubles and technological advances of the early 2000s represented a turning point for libraries of all kinds. The 2007–09 financial crisis caused a withdrawal of state funding for public institutions, while private universities and libraries saw a reduction in endowments (Geiger, 2015). Along with these reductions, the prices of scholarly monographs and serials, which had been rising through the 1980s (Carrigan, 1996; Rossmann & Arlitsch, 2015), continued to rise beyond the rate of inflation. Increased scrutiny of the cost and values of higher education along with growing interest in the technology and content of distance learning began to change the way patrons interacted with libraries. Along with these usage changes, libraries faced shrinking collection spaces, a larger demand for new types of collaborative spaces, and a stagnation in building expansions (Mays, 2012).
Though collection assessment has always been an important part of library service, these changes have led many librarians to approach collection building with data-driven attention to budgets and an awareness of their finite storage spaces. Librarian resourcefulness and new options from vendors have led to experimentation with different methods and formats. Strategies that had been around for decades, like collaborative collection building, consortia participation, floating collections, and working with nonlibrary partners have taken on a new urgency. Newer strategies like evidence-based collection development, short-term loans, and pay-per-view emerged and have been quickly and broadly adopted. The changes made to policies and acquisitions strategies have had an impact on library service at all levels, from ensuring that patrons are able to find and use information (Hedlund & Copeland, 2013) to keeping the peace and the lights on as units of the library that once functioned separately suddenly find themselves thrown together in new workflows (De Fino & Lo, 2011).
Libraries have been experiencing flat or reduced budgets since 2008, and much of the personnel expansion in libraries has been towards electronic resources management and development. With these developments there has been a greater examination of workflows and costs in libraries, including examinations of cataloging and processing workflows. This has led to more outsourcing as well as a greater reliance on electronic resources. The same financial pressures that have made budgets static have also impacted publishers. Sixty percent of publishers indicated that their business models were impacted by the 2008–09 economic downturn (Moeller, 2013).
Like all organizations, libraries have become more data-driven and our institutions and funders require quantitative proof of usage and financial decision making. Demand-driven acquisition (DDA) is an appropriate model for this because of the opportunities for data collection, the options for loan and purchase, and the high circulation rate, which helps justify increased costs and more complex workflows. The University of Maryland is an example of an institution that used DDA to overcome budget difficulties, opting for three short-term, 24-h loans before a multiuser license was purchased. They also built in a manual override for the short-term loan process so they could purchase a multiuser license right away for titles that seemed popular (Mays, 2012). Short-term loans, which give users full access to materials for a limited time, have an additional benefit for budget justifications because it is easy to contrast the level of access with the cost of purchasing all the titles outright. The library literature at the end of the first decade of the 21st century is full of examples like the one at the University of Maryland and many of the DDA programs that began during this time are now mature and standing methods of purchase.
Increasing prices for serials have remodeled the way libraries allocate funds, most libraries are now devoting less than a quarter of their total acquisitions expenditures to books and spending most of their budgets on electronic serials (Rossmann & Arlitsch, 2015). Bob Holley theorizes that it is possible that the rise of DDA is enabling a reduced expenditure on monographs by getting faculty members and other active patrons what they need without developing a speculative collection of materials for other patrons to discover (Holley, 2011). In a 2010 issue of Against the Grain, John D. Riley suggested that libraries took so quickly to DDA because they had already adopted a needs-based purchasing model as a result of shrinking acquisitions budgets (Riley, 2010).
DDA supports active patrons at the point of need and there is some evidence that this strategy also supports subsequent circulations in the research, which will be discussed at length in Part II of this volume. It is still difficult to know whether DDA is a good model for everyone; inexperienced or passive patrons who might not have a good idea of what they need until they see and use library resources may be left out by a strategy that requires proactive use of library materials. Publishers used to a certain percentage of fluff purchasing by libraries may need to adjust their policies. One of the primary fears of DDA is that we may not know if there are implications for these stakeholders until after it is too late to assist them.
On the other side of this, there has also been an explosion in the research surrounding DDA and other user-driven acquisitions strategies and researchers are attuned to the criticisms as well as the benefits of DDA programs. There is evidence that DDA programs of all kinds are serving patrons well and increasing the usage of collections. In a data-driven world, the benefits of shrinking costs per use and the evidence of what seems to be blossoming usage of electronic resources is more valuable than ever. Careful assessment is necessary to ensure that we are meeting the needs of all patrons, from those motivated enough to go to great lengths to request what they need to those who access library resources for the first time the night before an assignment is due, but the tools and strategies we are using to accomplish this goal are becoming more available and reliable. There is cause to be cautiously optimistic about the state of acquisitions.
1.1 The Emergence of Demand-Driven Acquisitions
Richard Trueswell suggested in 1969 that 20% of a typical academic library’s collection generated about 80% of circulations (Trueswell, 1969). This idea has been tested several times with mixed results. Some librarians find that it is representative of how circulations generally fall in their traditionally acquired collections, though it leaves out some important factors like the age of the items and the time that the items have already spent on the shelf (Burrell, 1985). What we know for certain about Trueswell’s ratio is that it does not apply equally to all libraries. Factors like discipline, type of library, and proportion of undergraduate to graduate users change both the breadth and depth of circulations in any given library (Alan, Chrzastowski, German, & Wiley, 2011). OhioLINK’s massive consortium study is a great representation of this, they found that circulation rates were effected by the age of the materials, the institution, and the discipline (Force, Gammon, & O’Neill, 2011).
Ohio State University Libraries traces the “just in case” acquisitions model back to the rise of universities after World War II, when there was an influx of enrollment and money from returning veterans. In order to provide for this boom and the future students that would follow, universities began developing large collections and models for continuing to collect materials that they predicted would circulate. Changes toward the turn of the 20th century caused institutions including Ohio State University to begin examining this policy and experimenting with alternatives (Hodges, Preston, & Hamilton, 2010).
These alternatives have made an impact, but circulation issues are complex and there are several significant examples of both large percentages of uncirculated materials and concentrated groups of hyper-use materials. Penn State and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) analyzed their print approval plan circulations from 2004–05 and found that 31% of Penn State’s materials and 40% of the UIUC materials did not circulate within 1–2 years. Twenty-four percent of Penn State’s materials and 9% of UIUC’s materials circulated more than five times within the same period (Alan et al., 2011). The University of Liverpool found a similar ratio with ebook package materials, 40% of these had not circulated in 2 years and 3.4% of items circulated more than five times within a year (Bucknell, 2010). Low circulation rates were also revealed in the University of Pittsburgh study (Kent, 1979) and further echoed by a 2010 Cornell University report that suggested 55% of the University’s monographs acquired since 1990 had never circulated (Goedeken & Lawson, 2015).
Amy Fry’s article in Library Philosophy and Practice thoroughly examines the confirmed data we have on print circulations and suggests that these dismal percentages may not tell the whole story of traditionally acquired print circulations in academic libraries (Fry, 2015). The ebook frenzy and rise of DDA programs in 2010–11 did seem to have an impact on the way print circulations were portrayed in the literature. Though it is tempting to compare the phenomenal circulations and daringly low costs per use of ebook DDA to traditionally acquired physical monographs, they are very different. We know that our common measures of use for both print and ebooks present incomplete pictures of how our users interact with our resources.
What we can tell though, is that ebooks cast a much wider net of use and are capturing more kinds of use, both scholarly and glancing. Our traditional circulation measures only suggest that someone once had an intent of seriously using the book and their actual behavior may have been quite different. We cannot see, as we do in ebooks, the users that take our items off the shelf, page through them or read them for a moment and then put them back on the shelf, but we also lose data about the books that were deeply important to the research of a few users. There is simply not a very good measure for the use of physical books (Danielson, 2012) and this factor restricts our ability to compare the two formats in fair ways.
We also know that institutional and individual differences between libraries, which may not be obvious when looking at only circulation data, impact the depth and breadth of circulations even in institutions with similar rates and methods of purchase. The Penn State and the UIUC study we examined earlier in the chapter is a good example for this phenomenon. Penn State’s bigger population and increased course reserve circulations are probably responsible for the wider circulation of materials they observed. Creating collections and setting up DDA trials that are appropriate for the size and population of particular libraries is very important. This concept of right sizing may have had an impact on the percentages of uncirculated and hypercirculated materials that each university observed. Penn State and UIUC had similar-sized material pools at 13,658 and 11,037 respectively, but Penn State’s user population was around 98,000 at the time while UIUC’s was around 45,000 (Alan et al., 2011). The concepts of right sizing, uncirculated material counts, and hypercirculations are important measures that will come up again in the research analysis. This volume will use the term hypercirculation to refer to the group of materials with the most circulations in a particular collection, not to refer to a specific number. The rates of circulation differ greatly between ebooks and physical books and between materials acquired in different ways, but there is a lot to learn from examining the group of materials that performs particularly well in usage for each of these collections.
There is a lot of conflicting information about ebook access, but what seems clear is that ebooks are becoming more common in libraries (Sharp & Thompson, 2010) and users are becoming more open to reading ebooks under some circumstances, even if they generally prefer print (Mizrachi, 2015; Walton, 2014). Ebooks are also good tools for assessment; they capture a lot of the data that physical books are missing including the many glancing and few deep uses. This wide net of usage is undoubtedly part of the reason that ebook circulations look so good to librarians. As anyone who has worked in a library can attest, the uses of spaces, services, and collections encompass ideal use, but are also home to many other sorts of activities and uses. Though data for this are impossible to collect, it is likely that physical book circulations exclude a lot of these alternative uses and digital book circulations probably erroneously include them (Rose-Wiles, 2013).
Even if physical items that spend their lives on the shelf are not as extensive as initially quoted, most libraries still want to avoid spending money on materials that patrons do not use. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln estimated that they spent an average of $325,137 per year between 2003 and 2008 on books that did not circulate and that is with a relatively respectable percentage of circulating materials at about 54% (Tyler, Melvin, Yang, Epp, & Kreps, 2011). The University of Alaska Fairbanks looked at one example of a $55,000 approval plan investment over 1 year in engineering. Within 5 years only 10% of those books had circulated (Jensen, 2012). Cornell University Libraries also found that 55% of their traditionally selected items published since 1990 had not circulated (Walker et al., 2010). This climate of physical book assessment evolved alongside the practices for DDA and the two literatures directly influence one another.
One of the common goals of print and ebook collection building is to create collections that are broadly used and another is to create collections that are deeply used. Ideally, librarians would be able to create collections that are used both broadly and deeply, but different formats and collection development activities have different strengths. A diverse collection development strategy with clear goal setting, robust assessment, and quick iterations of experimentation is the best way to build collections with a wide percentage of use and the capacity to support deep, sustained research. DDA can be a great part of this strategy and assessment, both of DDA programs and of other collections in the library, can help collection development evolve and change towards broader and deeper usage.
Removing barriers to change is the first step in this process. Thomas Peters observed in 2000 that “computers have changed everything—except perhaps the working assumptions and beliefs of the majority of collection development librarians” (Peters, 2000). Even though many years have passed since Peters wrote this, our strategies and goals have not developed as quickly as our technologies and tools. Individual librarian attitudes are seldom the cause of slow rates of change in libraries, but institutional ideas at the library and global level sometimes make for hard-won progress in changing styles and methods of collection building. Library acquisitions operate in a digital-enabled world that comes from a strong print tradition and shaking off the workflows and assumptions of print is a process that is still in progress. Fortunately, along with the technologies that offer greater collection development control to our patrons, have come new tools and strategies to evaluate our holdings.
One of the most common criticisms of DDA as a strategy is that patrons fail to distinguish their immediate research needs from their learning requirements (Sens & Fonseca, 2013). DDA shifts the burden of cooking up a collection from a small group of librarians to a large group of patrons, but librarians still have to stock the kitchen with the ingredients that will make for the best outcome. The work of selection librarians shifts in DDA to creating the profile from which patrons will choose. They have the freedom to include resources that are outside the traditional scope, but all should be of sufficient quality that they will have long and fruitful lives on the shelf. Another common issue for DDA programs is that they do not serve all stakeholders equally. Patrons that use the libraries benefit most from the inclusion of DDA and patrons that rely on using book collections on the shelf may be left out of some DDA decisions (Walters, 2012) though they may be the beneficiaries of users with more foresight and similar research interests.
There are also some barriers that are unique to ebook programs. The success of ebooks depends on both the user’s equipment for access and the availability of digital books to the library market (Benhamou, 2015). Ebook availability has improved, but it still is not universal. The University of Mississippi conducted a collection assessment by looking at books that had circulated for the first time in 2012 to see how many of these could have been purchased on demand. They found that 8020 titles were used for the first time in 2012 and, of these, 6130 titles (76%) were available for purchase as ebooks. Some of the titles were also in the public domain, so only 21% of titles were unavailable for purchase or access in any electronic format. The University participates in a consortium and only 1% of the titles could not be purchased, accessed freely, or borrowed from another member institution. Sixty-four percent of the titles had been published after 1990 (Herrera, 2015). This is a promising strategy, especially as publisher backfiles move towards greater electronic access. It also represents an exciting possibility for increased on-demand purchasing and reduced “just in case” purchasing. If libraries can get nearly anything on demand, the task of stocking libraries with materials that patrons might need becomes less essential.
Ebooks are considered to be leased rather than purchased outright because the vendor almost always owns most uses of the file and the proprietary platform. Because ebooks are not owned, they cannot be sold or transferred (Walters, 2014). Vendor license terms often specify that these materials are restricted from being shared via interlibrary loan (Radnor & Shrauger, 2012). Even perpetual access titles might be considered leased, because the future of any given platform or vendor is uncertain. The move from physical to ephemeral seems frightening and radical, but it does not necessarily represent a fundamental shift from the way librarians have always managed collections. We have always had to make preservation plans, it’s not a flood or fire that is going to destroy ebook collections, but there are other digital natural disasters that might impact our collections like obsolescence or companies collapsing, and it makes sense for libraries to make a preservation plan in the event that these things happen. For digital items this is not every few years or so, but at the time of licensing and license renewal. This process should begin to involve more people at the institutional level, it is no longer simply an issue for acquisitions librarians, but involves many other workflows as well as including preservation, interlibrary loan, and collection management.
Ebooks also can be challenging to promote. Because these items are not physically visible, libraries must work hard to ensure that these resources are easily accessible via the catalog and available for both browsing and actively searching patrons. These materials should be clearly and proudly differentiated as ebooks and libraries should select discovery platforms that clearly represent ebooks and ensure that access is seamless. Kent State evaluated how users come to access ebooks and found that most users were accessing specific titles through the library’s bibliographic catalog rather than browsing for titles on the Ebrary interface. An overwhelming number of these searches came from general keywords, with a not insignificant portion coming from title and author searches. The researchers called these accesses “full-orthodox” because they showed some will on the part of the patron in seeking out a specific title or topic. They also found that when users clicked the first result, they were significantly more likely to trigger the book. The researchers took this as a sign that users had intention when searching to find specific titles, many of the keyword searches actually contained significant numbers of words from the specific triggered title. Their research revealed that over 70% of trigger purchases were associated with searches and click-throughs from the bibliographic record (Urbano, Zhang, Downey, & Klingler, 2015). This means that the catalog is still a very important discovery interface for users and that ensuring users are able to find materials in the online catalog is as important as making sure they can find their way around our physical stacks.
Ebook visibility is also important for library branding. Many libraries are reducing their print collections to make more space for patrons, but continuing to brand the library as a space to get information and access resources is important, even if those resources are invisible to users walking into our buildings. Since the digital transition, libraries have endured a period of identity transition and our work experimenting with new formats and methods has ensured that libraries have remained relevant to our users. Promoting this spirit of inquiry to our users is essential to the library mission as our spaces transform from book repositories to active and evolving information spaces.
Though there are many roads to increasing patron input in collection development, the rapid rise of DDA and the vast majority of the research publications on this subject are strongly tied to the demand for and availability of ebooks. Many universities are developing programs and courses to meet a greater demand for online and distance education. For academic libraries, this means that our student body and patron base is increasingly far-flung. Academic publishers have jumped on the digital bandwagon and every year more titles are available in this format. For public libraries, this road has been rockier but the demand for digital content spiked in the early 2000s and continues to rise, albeit at a more moderate pace. DDA does not always involve ebooks, but the strategy that took the acquisitions world by storm in 2010–11 was catalog-integrated ebook DDA. Physical books can also be acquired via DDA, and many examples of this will be examined, but the fate of the strategy is inexorably tied to the digital format. Libraries, especially public libraries, have long used informal suggestions and more formal suggestion request forms to connect with patrons and develop collections, but interlibrary loan-to-purchase programs and a greater emphasis on the benefits of patron-selected materials in the early 2000s led to a grand adoption of catalog-integrated electronic DDA when the option became available through common vendors (Fulton, 2014).
The rise of DDA is strongly tied to the explosion of new ebook platforms, e-reader technologies, and ebook research in 2010–11. In 2010 and 2011 DDA sales were growing in popularity and sales of ebooks in the personal market were also at record highs. This time period marked the beginning of increased acceptance of the electronic format. An American Library Association report specified that ebook sales rose 210% between 2010 and 2011, but print volumes still accounted for 79% of trade sales (Besen & Kirby, 2012). By the end of 2011, Amazon announced that their electronic sales had surpassed their print sales (Miller & Bosman, 2011). Though ebooks were still a small percentage of book sales from all retailers, this was a proof of concept that ebook sellers offering competitive pricing and extraordinary convenience could change the reading habits of their customers from print to blended or even fully digital.
This new acceptance of ebooks also had an impact on library purchasing. The J.N. Desmarais Library of Laurentian University explored their ebook usage during and after this period. Making ebooks discoverable is of upmost importance. Laurentian does this by putting links to all of its ebooks immediately up on the library’s website. They found that during the first 7 years of ebook acquisitions (2002–09) they experienced a steadily increasing interest in searching and viewing ebooks. In 2010 they saw an exponential increase in both interest and acquisitions. They added about 30,000 ebooks to the collection and there was a huge increase in searches and viewings for the ebook content (Lamothe, 2013).
In the intervening years, digital sales have plateaued in popular reading (Alter, 2015) and libraries, especially public libraries, have faced an uncertain and frequently changing ebook market (Benhamou, 2015). Ebook purchasing has fluctuated in public libraries but the bump in demand through the early 2000s established vendors and protocols that have made digital purchasing at least as simple as print both in personal purchasing and in most academic libraries. There are no certainties about the future of ebooks but many possibilities. As with any format, ebooks have drawbacks like restrictive licenses, promotion challenges, and sometimes even resistance within library communities. Ebooks also tend to be more expensive than print titles though there are many more options for purchasing these materials and a lot more flexibility for models in the future. Movements like open access might shift the payment paradigms that libraries are used to, but the purchasing strategy for print books is unlikely to change very much. Access to ebooks is very diverse. The most recent Pew study indicates that 68% of adults now own a smartphone and 86% of adults ages 18–29 use smartphones. Computer ownership among adults in this age group has also dropped, from 89% in 2012 to 78% in 2015 (Anderson, 2015).
The method of access, though it does not change the format of the item, should shape the way libraries think about providing devices to support their demand-driven acquisitions programs. Acquiring more desktop computers, laptops, and large-format screens might drive ebook use more than the purchase of dedicated e-readers and support for users of smartphones and tablets should be among the main objectives of library service. The personal and library institutional ebook markets have thus far remained very separate, with Amazon and Barnes & Noble accounting for more than 85% of personal ebook sales and other companies like Ebrary, Proquest, and EBSCO accounting for most academic library sales (Survey of Ebook Penetration and Use in US Academic Libraries (New York: Library Journal, 2010)). The major differentiators between these two groups are in price and licensure. It may be that these two markets become more differentiated, but if a large-scale player in the personal ebook space like Amazon begins to offer institutional licensing the landscape of library ebook purchasing could change greatly.
1.2 Libraries and Publishers
In addition to changing the way libraries serve patrons, DDA also changes the relationship between libraries and publishers. DDA and the rise of ebooks has raised questions about how use-based spending will affect publishers as libraries move from purchasing entire catalogs to only purchasing materials patrons use (Fischer, Wright, Clatanoff, Barton, & Shreeves, 2012). The reshuffling of acquisitions programs in preparation for DDA initiatives has caused publishers and librarians to examine their complex relationship and evaluate the impact of the greater patron focus in collection building and the increasing prevalence of digital materials. Librarians cannot predict what will happen to the ebook industry as it matures. This is a caution borne from multiple iterations of new library technologies that were sometimes sustainable and sometimes became obsolete almost as soon as we had invested money in them (Sens & Fonseca, 2013). Many libraries are burdened with aging formats and hardware that are increasingly expensive and difficult to maintain even as their usage declines. The next generation of librarians may very well need to sift through our elderly ebooks, hosted on rapidly aging software and making clutter and trouble in our streamlined zippy future online catalogs. It is also possible that the dream of perpetual access will come true for libraries. Like any industry riding the squall of technology, we need to grasp the most likely lifeboat and hope that it does not have too many holes. We continue to do our best to provide for the needs our users have now while trying to keep an eye on what is coming up. Neither vendors nor libraries can predict the future of technology and we are all going to have to work together to ensure that we are doing the best possible assessment and planning for it.
DDA changes the balance between libraries and publishers in significant ways. Instead of purchasing a reliable quantity of newly published titles, DDA moves purchasing to the point of need, scattered across the semester and sometimes dipping back into older publications. The publishing model for many publishers operates on the assumption that many libraries will purchase broadly and in the process acquire many materials their communities never use, this is particularly true for scholarly and academic presses. DDA is disruptive for publishers, but the goals of libraries and publishers are still aligned. Robust DDA programs are good for users, libraries, and publishers. Increasing the discoverability of ebook records and making ebooks more usable and flexible is a process that librarians and publishers will take on in collaboration as user data continue to shape product and collection development (Seger & Allen, 2011).
This greater alignment is a shift for libraries as well. Jean-Mark Sens and Anthony J. Fonseca warn that academic librarians ought not to embrace DDA programs too quickly, because the increasing similarity of library catalogs to bookstores puts the brand at risk. Sens and Fonseca also warn against the increasing weight of publishers in the representation of library records (2013). This worry is compounded by the presence of library publishers in discovery platforms and their power to optimize results towards their own materials. The oligarchical distribution of library technology and publishing means that for many libraries, the same company or small group of companies is producing both content and discovery tools and in this relationship there is the potential for abuse. Patron choice is important particularly for DDA programs and data-driven collection development, so librarians should be vigilant over the search result weight in discovery systems so the friendly publisher is not skewed over the right content for the right patron. Barbara Quint warns in her Information Today article, “Do we let publishers and vendors design our collections and just tell them what we’re going to get?” (Quint, 2014). With increasing alliances between publishers and the vendors of discovery systems, this is a very real threat to our searches. Librarians should monitor this carefully and examine alternative discovery strategies if the major discovery systems fail to give librarians full control to tweak their search algorithms and change the weights of different providers.
Some publisher costs, like distribution and printing, will decrease with the rise of ebooks, but some costs, like management and making materials visible, will increase. The turn to ebooks takes the power out of the hands of publishers to be the sole arbiters of what information gets turned into a book. Because the costs of producing a book are lowered, the market should begin to flatten out with a reduction in the barrier to entry. This might be similar to what we have seen as the music industry has gone digital.
Users are still going to seek out the book equivalent of Beyoncé on established platforms, but reputable, reliable sources for discovering new content, like Bandcamp (https://bandcamp.com/) will begin to rise up and legitimize as sources of information. This process will be disruptive not only for publishers’ costs but for the evaluation of library materials. Publisher quality used to inform collection development decisions, but in the future of publishing quality materials might be produced by anyone. Libraries must seek to understand this system, or find ways to help patrons access materials that might not be a traditional book or published through a publisher, but might be good for collections anyway (Benhamou, 2015).
DDA is a good model for this, but libraries have to be proactive about ensuring that these materials can be accessed by patrons. The work of collection development is becoming a more serendipitous process. While libraries may have favored publishers, formats, and methods for obtaining materials, it seems like patrons are finding their resources more often on the web and looking for the materials they have discovered in libraries after the fact.
Libraries are also pushing on publishers harder to provide fair terms for ebooks. Several librarians at UNC Charlotte have been working on an initiative to push academic ebook vendors towards policies and standards that are good for the long-term collection health of libraries. UNC Charlotte began this initiative in 2014 with a Charleston Conference presentation that explored the sustainability of acquiring only ebooks that ensured perpetual access, allowed for an unlimited number of simultaneous users, and were free from digital rights management (DRM). They recruited a working group of professionals from libraries, consortia, and publishing and have secured a Mellon grant to explore these issues further (Hamaker, 2016). Other platforms like Portico and LOCKSS/CLOCKSS focus on the shared interests of librarians and publishers to minimize future information loss.
The Claremont Colleges have been investigating purchasing DRM-free books directly from publishers for years. It is likely that these types of books (which can be fully “owned” by the library, that is: distributed, downloaded, printed, controlled, etc.) won’t ever be integrated into something so sleek as catalog-integrated ebook DDA, but if libraries are investing heavily in ebooks without a guarantee that they will stick around forever it’s worth investigating (Price, 2011).
Another argument from Sens and Fonseca questions whether librarian and publisher needs are really as well-aligned as we tend to think. It is true that publishers had the need and desire to push a profitable model for ebook sales even before libraries sought them out, but there are very practical reasons that libraries approach ebooks. Ebooks are useful for sharing our progress with stakeholders, because we are able to back up their existence with extensive usage data, it is quick and easy for us to produce impressive statistics that may help keep our budgets stocked. They are also good for the kind of public relations that universities are doing right now, offering new types of online learning initiatives requires a well-stocked electronic library that is accessible both on and off campus and this is an ecosystem that still requires both journals and monographs. For public libraries, ebooks help us deliver the materials they want in new ways (Gray & Copeland, 2012).
Joseph Esposito has written prolifically about the impact of these new acquisitions policies on the business practices of publishers. He continues to write for the Scholarly Kitchen (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/). He notes that cost reduction policies in libraries necessitate changes in publisher workflows. DDA or not, our budgets are shrinking. Esposito also suggests that the different purchasing model, that is triggers not coming at the point of publication but at the point of trigger (which might be much later) could impact publishers’ ability to plan. He counsels that publishers will deal with DDA in different ways, commercial publishers might experiment with including or excluding titles from DDA programs to observe the effects on sales, while university presses should focus on long-term relevance, since many of their titles are of the “long tail” of academia which may be triggered even years after publication.
There is a potential scenario in which university presses lose so much money that they begin to restrict output, though this is just an extension of a process that has been happening for years already. One of the most compounding issues with this is that at the same time DDA is becoming a serious strategy, course adoption purchasing is anecdotally declining as libraries begin to offer more reserve and course books for checkout. A lot of this is pure speculation though, since there are not good published numbers on how many books from these presses are sold to libraries and whether that percentage is declining (Esposito, Walker, & Ehling, 2013). Esposito also suggests in a later article that as libraries become less dependent on stocking libraries with all the relevant titles and more dependent on data to make collection development decisions, publishers and vendors may start to commercialize these data and sell them to libraries (Esposito, 2015).
Sandy Thatcher and Rick Anderson also debated the question of whether DDA will crush the scholarly publishing market in Against the Grain. Thatcher defends the right and role of university presses to publish niche monographs that are commercial failures, while Anderson suggests that perhaps the model of obscure scholarship for the sake of monographs should be put to bed. The suggestion of the debate was that universities as a whole have an obligation to support scholarship for the benefit of institutions and scholars across the system, but that this is not necessarily the responsibility of library collection developers to solve (Arch, Anderson, & Thatcher, 2011). Libraries alternatively can invest in other tools and platforms that enable their academics to share scholarly research outside the monograph form. Development and maintenance of institutional repositories and more informal scholarly sharing and collaboration platforms might help to do this. There have also been some efforts to collaboratively support the scholarly publishing industry through consortia. Four State University of New York research centers made an agreement to collaboratively purchase the entire yearly catalog of eight university presses and share the usage between their institutions (Booth & O’Brien, 2011). When this kind of collaboration serves both library patrons and the output of our faculty and scholars in university presses it could serve as one potential solution to this problem.
The relationship between libraries and publishers is definitely changing and DDA is only one part of this. It is good practice to keep the fraught parts of this relationship in mind when purchasing and setting up things like discovery platforms and the harmonious parts of this relationship in mind when making collection development decisions. The level of guilt or fear about the future of publishing when starting a DDA program is unique to every institution. Questions about the future of ebooks and publishing are difficult to answer because so much is uncertain, but the good news is that many librarians and publishers are actively involved in hammering out the unknowns and, in that endeavor at least, the interests of publishers and librarians are perfectly aligned.
1.3 Going Forward
We have considered the climate that led to the advancement of DDA as an acquisitions strategy, examined the library issues surrounding its advancement and success, and have discussed the potential issues that may arise for publishers and libraries as we embrace ebooks and DDA programs. The short history of DDA has already been a wild ride, but what can we expect from its future? Much of this is pure speculation, but we may see things like developing license types for ebook materials, increased scrutiny on patron security when using library technologies, a diversification in patron access strategies, and the rising importance of discovery platforms for connecting users with information.
We might also see a rise in DDA acceptance. A recent survey of small academic library directors in Indiana found that 82% of these institutions did not have ebook DDA programs yet, but 82% of those directors felt confident that their patrons would choose appropriate selections that would circulate in the library if given the chance to purchase using DDA. Several of the directors indicated that, even though they believed in DDA and wanted to implement a program, staff and time constraints prevented them from starting one (Freeman, Nixon, & Ward, 2015). Librarians that fall into this group might appreciate the next chapter, which will outline a wide variety of DDA plans options that are appropriate for different budget and staffing configurations.
Along with these options for creating DDA programs, librarians might see an increase in the ways patrons are accessing library materials. A study out of Boise State University investigated whether students could access and use library resources successfully via several mobile devices including tablets, smartphones, and e-readers. Student use was studied with a pre and post survey along with a focus group. Participants’ use of library electronic resources including ebooks rose with participation in the program, so it’s likely that many of the users were not accessing ebooks in the catalog because they did not know about them. Students suggested that they had problems with ebook usability because they could not annotate the text and they did not like to read electronically for extended periods. Seventy-eight percent of students believed that electronic resource access would improve education in the future (Glackin, Rodenhiser, & Herzog, 2014). Though there are still issues with ebook access it is heartening that students appreciate accessing electronic materials and feel that they will improve education.
We also owe it to patrons to help improve their experiences using electronic materials in the library. One of the things that libraries can do towards this goal is work to strengthen privacy controls and ensure that our vendors are doing the same. Andromeda Yelton spoke brilliantly on this subject at her keynote to the 2016 LibTech Conference in St. Paul, MN. Her notes, along with a list of questions and answers that even nontechnical librarians can use to talk to their vendors about patron privacy are available on her website (https://andromedayelton.com/talks/ltc2016/). Another thing that librarians can do to improve the electronic experience for patrons is help create and organize discovery and delivery platforms so that all library users, both new and experienced, can access electronic materials in a straightforward way. The web-scale discovery layers on the library market today are very powerful and put many kinds of resources within reach through a single search bar, but they mostly fail to provide context for this information and their recommendation algorithms can sometimes be skewed to favor one vendor over another. These discovery platforms improve the initial user transaction in our systems (Lundrigan, Manuel, & Yan, 2015), but the mess of different types of resources they sometimes return could be overwhelming for users. The way discovery platforms impact usage statistics is also still an emerging scholarship.
Discovery layer research definitely shows that this technology will have an impact on the way our patrons use materials. When the University of Liverpool adopted the EBSCO Discovery Service they saw a decline in their usage of SpringerLink journal titles. They theorized that this might have been due to users discovering ebooks that had previously been hidden to them when they were doing journal article searches, though the use of both journal articles and ebooks increased over the next several months (Bucknell, 2012). Penn State conducted a study with Proquest’s Summon that showed that use of the system decreased the number of erroneous interlibrary loan requests for materials the library already owned (Musser & Coopey, 2015). As the research in this area grows, it is certain that we will see more examples of the ways discovery layers are impacting our patrons’ use of the system and how that could effect our purchasing and assessment.
Discovery layers and other search technologies also offer libraries the opportunity to promote DDA collections. Most institutions do not promote this strategy, a survey found that 74% of respondents did not promote DDA programs offered by their libraries (Carrico, Leonard, & Gallagher, 2016). One of the big barriers to this is fear about the library budget or that some patrons would use this knowledge to purposefully trigger materials the library may not need. Rutgers University used a great solution to balance promotion with caution. They did not advertise their DDA program, but informed new students in particular disciplines that they intended to strengthen the ebook collection (De Fino & Lo, 2011). This strategy might build interest in ebook collections and DDA without releasing specifics.
DDA has the potential to evolve in many directions beyond what we have explored here, but these ideas represent some present-based things for librarians focused on ebooks and DDA programs to keep in mind. Promoting these collections and conducting user surveys can help further predictions in specific institutions.