Keywords

Demand-driven acquisitions; research; ebooks; diversity; format; digital acquisitions; interlibrary loan-to-purchase; subject areas; selection; publication date; collection balance; user groups; discipline selection; format diversity

4.1 Supporting a Diverse Learning Environment

Digital DDA has the potential to diversify collections, especially if the library has been engaged in primarily physical acquisitions, because digital content enables a wider range of users to access library resources from on or off campus and broad discovery pools can sometimes reveal unmet needs in the community. This was the case at the University of Huddersfield, which embarked on a DDA program in 2014 and invested £100,000 in the program because it was expected to improve user experience. Their analysis of this program revealed an eclectic and somewhat unbalanced purchasing strategy, many titles that they would not have acquired via traditional means were acquired via DDA and they acquired mostly titles in the social sciences with very few in art. Seventy-four percent of the DDA selectors were undergraduates. During the 9-week pilot 637 titles were triggered from a discovery pool of 133,000 (Stone & Heyhoepullar, 2015). Even though their acquisitions were not what they expected, their circulations were convincing during the pilot year, with 100% of titles gaining subsequent circulations contrasted with their 40% print circulation rate. It is possible that their collection had not been meeting the needs of undergraduate users and the PDA program gave them a “voice” in collection development.

San José State University’s DDA program also revealed strong undergraduate use. Fifty-two percent of triggers were enacted by undergraduate users, 32% were graduate users and 15% were faculty and staff (Chan & Kendall, 2013). Catalog-integrated ebook DDA seems to appeal to undergraduate users who are comfortable browsing the library catalog, but do not access interlibrary loan services. This is apparent when we look at interlibrary loan-to-purchase programs which require users to submit a request form through the interlibrary loan workflow before a determination of purchase is made by the institution. These programs, like interlibrary loan services, are primarily accessed by graduate students and faculty.

Subject librarians at the Ohio State University expressed some worry about the availability of DDA to undergraduates in a survey conducted by researchers from the institution. The subject librarians were concerned that the limited funds for collection development should be spent on upper-level research materials rather than being guided by the broad interest of undergraduate users. They also worried that featuring student-selected purchases along with traditional purchases would polarize acquisitions so that everything was either a general interest interdisciplinary work or upper-level research. The Library used these trials and suggestions to develop a hybrid model that retained subject selectors and DDA (Hodges et al., 2010). More assessment and time are needed before Ohio State University librarians are able to tell whether the subject selectors' warnings about collection polarization came to pass, but it is clear that they are supporting study that falls outside pure collection building with their DDA program and this is a valuable step towards inclusive scholarship.

The University of Mississippi’s interlibrary loan-to-purchase DDA program demonstrates this breakdown. During their pilot year, they purchased 571 books, 45 ebooks, and 24 media items. More than half of the requests came from faculty and staff members and 36% came from graduate students, with just over 10% of materials requested by undergraduate students. The reason for this breakdown seems to be that the interlibrary loan requests during the period mostly also came from graduate students and faculty (Herrera & Greenwood, 2011). Faculty and graduate students were also the predominant requestors in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s interlibrary loan-to-purchase program (Bombeld & Hanerfeld, 2013). It is possible that preparing the interlibrary loan form was too high a bar for undergraduate general interest research or that undergraduates were not aware that they could request materials through interlibrary loan.

DDA programs, even if they dissuade particular groups, as in the case of interlibrary loan-to-purchase, still help fill unmet needs in the community. The University of North Carolina Wilmington did find that even faculty requests through the interlibrary loan-to-purchase program were expanding the scope of their purchasing. They found that even if they had liaison librarians assigned to departments, many faculty members did not know to use them to purchase materials in their field and instead turned to interlibrary loan. Their DDA program helped catch those requests and turn them into purchases (Bombeld & Hanerfeld, 2013). Librarians from Purdue University’s interlibrary loan-to-purchase program suggest that librarians should still use caution when pledging too much of their budget to any one strategy. Users and requesters are not balanced populations and DDA programs of all types could leave out particular groups of users. Different styles of DDA can bring out different subsets of users, but it is important to assess these strategies to ensure that all groups in the community are served by the acquisitions strategy as a whole (Anderson et al., 2010).

4.2 Supporting Diverse Content

DDA programs can help increase collection content diversity by allowing users to trigger materials outside of their disciplines. San José State University found that this was the case, particularly among undergraduate users of the system. This makes sense because undergraduates often have a more diverse curriculum augmented by courses outside their majors, but researchers found that graduate students and faculty members also triggered interdisciplinary titles slightly more than titles in their discipline (Chan & Kendall, 2013).

Even though Purdue University has a strong STEM focus, most of the purchases through their DDA program were in the liberal arts. Librarians at Purdue thought this might be because they were better at selecting books in STEM disciplines so users did not need to request materials through DDA, that STEM users might use journal content more frequently for their research, or that their DDA price cap was excluding some STEM titles that would have been triggered. They were also able to tell from the departmental affiliation of the requestor that interdisciplinary research had increased over the 10-year period. Despite a greater focus on the humanities in their program, only 2% of the titles were deemed inappropriate for the collection and nearly 90% represented materials published by academic or university presses (Anderson et al., 2010).

Brigham Young University also found increased discipline diversity when they began an interlibrary loan-to-purchase program aimed at faculty members. Many of the purchases requested by faculty represented interdisciplinary monographs or titles published by more obscure presses. The program was set up to help facilitate access to research that had not been acquired by any lending library available to the institution, so it makes sense that these titles were more esoteric. There was a clear demand for these titles and the interlibrary loan to purchase program created a workflow to make these types of materials accessible. The faculty that responded to an evaluative poll were appreciative that the library had obtained these materials (Alder, 2007).

In addition to opening up purchasing to titles from unknown publishers and interdisciplinary materials, DDA can also serve to make foreign language materials available in library collections even if the library does not have a speaker to select these languages. Programs to diversify collection languages are in action at Minnesota State University, Mankato (Schomberg & Grace, 2005) and Chicago Public Library’s DDA initiatives (A. Medlar, personal communication, January 27, 2016). Purdue University also expanded their DDA to purchase strategy to be more language-inclusive, acquiring French and German titles if they could not be borrowed. They also expanded this program to include media items like DVDs (Anderson et al., 2010).

In preparation for their interlibrary loan-to-purchase program, Purdue University librarians analyzed 6 months of interlibrary loan data to look at items that would have fallen into their profile. They found that the estimated cost of the titles that they had sent to interlibrary loan that had been published within the last 5 years and were available for less than $150 would have been more cost-effective to purchase than loan (Ward, 2002). They began their interlibrary loan-to-purchase program in 2000 and within 2 years they had purchased 1447 items for 652 unique users. They created a database of the titles and asked subject specialist librarians to determine whether they were appropriate for the collection. The librarians stated that given adequate funds, they would have purchased 80–99% of the titles that had been selected through the program, but had not included them in ordinary collection development because the materials were too new, the publisher was unknown to them, or the subject was interdisciplinary or crossdisciplinary. They found that most of the requesters were graduate students. Sixty-eight percent of the titles in the collection had circulated at least once after the initial circulation. This is in contrast to the traditionally acquired titles, 36% of which have circulated since purchase (Anderson et al., 2002). The patron feedback was also overwhelmingly positive: almost 80% of respondents indicated that the program was very useful and that their books arrived in good time. Librarians and administrators agreed that, though it represented a change in workflow that took time to perfect, the program was a good move for the library. They also found that the majority of requestors received only one book through the program, allaying their fears that a small minority of patrons would monopolize the funding (Ward, 2002).

The University of Wisconsin-Madison began an interlibrary loan-to-purchase program in 2001 which created an avenue for materials outside the traditional scope of library acquisitions. The criteria for this program were monograph interlibrary loan requests that fit into the scope of the University’s curriculum and had been published in the last 3–4 years. They limited the monographs to items priced below $250 and were open to using interlibrary loans to indicate that they should purchase additional copies of in-demand textbooks. Eight percent of the items they acquired via the interlibrary loan-to-purchase method were foreign imprints that were difficult or impossible to obtain via interlibrary loan and the circulation numbers resulting from this program were impressive, indicating that interlibrary loan-to-purchase had filled a void in their traditional acquisitions (Ward et al., 2003).

East Carolina University used DDA to diversify the format of their collections. The Library began purchasing electronic copies of dissertations and theses produced at other universities on demand in the 2000s. This represented a new type of acquisitions for the Library since they previously obtained external dissertations through interlibrary loan. In the first several years of the program they served nearly 28,000 students at all levels. Their DDA program was an interlibrary loan-to-purchase program for dissertations and theses that the staff could not request via interlibrary loan or find freely available online. These materials were saved to a folder that the patron could access for 30 days, after that the file was retained by the library but no longer accessible to the patron. They made a collection development call after the item was retained. If they thought it was likely to circulate again they would add it to the collection, if not they would simply delete it. They decided to add less than 20% of the items to the permanent collection (Gee & Shirkey, 2010).

They found that the program had an advantage in targeting crossdisciplinary materials that may not have fallen under departmental collection development strategies. The institution also anticipated moving to an interlibrary loan form that gives patrons the opportunity to suggest that the item be earmarked for purchase. A total of 279 titles were earmarked for purchase, but ended up being loaned instead. Some of these were items that could not be found for purchase, but the vast majority failed to meet secondary criteria: either they were too expensive or the format was not correct. Popular titles, proceedings, and dissertations were not included for purchase (Herrera & Greenwood, 2011).

These examples show ways that DDA can help increase diversity in library collections. Unlike many selector programs, DDA is interdisciplinary and encourages users to explore research from other fields. DDA can also help harvest the expertise of users to collect materials in different languages and formats. The other major advantage of DDA programs, particularly those that focus on ebook collections, is that they enable use from a broad base of patrons both within the physical library and around the world. DDA programs can be a useful tool for increasing diversity in collections and on campus.

4.3 Questions for Assessing Collections Based on Diversity