Assessing for Workflow and Preservation

Demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) programs represent a significant reorganization of workflows for many libraries. While the burden to librarians in traditional acquisitions falls in selection and maintenance, the real work in DDA programs comes before the program is integrated in creating the profile and setting up the options and after the selections have been made in assessment and future planning. There are many libraries that find DDA a less labor-intensive collection development option, but the real work only shifts from developing collections by hand to managing spending and profiles to ensure collections are guided and developing in appropriate ways. Librarians managing collection development have to establish clear goals and assess their collections to make sure they are meeting those goals. There is still a lot of work for librarians to do, it is just not the work you would imagine; this could be the slogan for the current era of librarianship, but it is equally true for maintaining DDA programs.

One of the effects of this shift is a change in the way library departments collaborate. Technical services departments that once did primarily physical processing and binding are shrinking and electronic resources groups are growing (Miller, 2011). In addition, workflows that used to function separately, like interlibrary loan and acquisitions, now have opportunities to work closely together to analyze collection development. This was true when Bucknell University began a print interlibrary loan-to-purchase program in 1999. The program was disruptive because through this work, their acquisitions and interlibrary loan teams needed to work together to establish new workflows and in working together became an integrated library unit (Perdue & Fleet, 1999). This was also the case when the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga implemented an interlibrary loan-to-purchase program. Their acquisitions and interlibrary loan departments found that they had to be in near constant communication about the budget for the program. This workflow adjustment was helped by the addition of OCLC’s WorldShare Management Service, which allowed interlibrary loan staff to access acquisitions workflows in order to determine whether an item was on order before they recommended it for purchase (Dunn & Murgai, 2014).

This type of integration is very common in technical services departments today, but workflows like interlibrary loan-to-purchase, which relied on holistic assessment across library units to gauge patron demand, changed the nature of how technical services teams operate and there is still a lot we can learn from sharing data and processes across teams in the library. Virginia Tech’s collection management department was integrated into a general technical services department in 2009 as decisions about all kinds of collections became more centralized. Their interlibrary loan team also joined the unit in 2013, which was important for the development of their purchase-on-demand program (Lener & Brown, 2015).

DDA programs can also change the role of front-facing staff in the acquisitions process. In traditional workflows, all the purchasing happens in collaborations between librarians and library staff members, but in bringing the patron into this process we also bring in new colleagues who never thought of themselves as collection developers. The University of Nebraska-Omaha did this when they experimented with lending Kindles, the circulation staff were given a “cap price” of $50 and they could spend up to that amount satisfying patron requests at the desk (Neujahr, 2011). This type of enabled instant purchasing for front-facing staff might be one of the new faces of DDA. Major vendors like YBP Library Services are now offering immediate access for some ebooks purchased through Gobi, so we are not far off from being able to satisfy in person requests right away and in person with the help of front-facing colleagues.

DDA workflows may also create a closer working relationship between vendors and librarians. Rutgers had this experience in their DDA pilot. Instead of selectors choosing books, catalogers and technical services members preparing them for the shelf, and users accessing them, their ebook workflow had vendors communicating with selectors and then vendors communicating selections to the cataloging team, after users selected materials in the DDA process, purchasing would be administered by the vendors and then catalogers would again be responsible for ensuring purchased items had permanent catalog records (De Fino & Lo, 2011). This process shows a much higher touch relationship between the companies that libraries use for purchasing and library workflows, which is why it is so important to ensure that work and thought goes into setting up triggers and workflows at the beginning of a DDA program.

Part of working out the relationship between vendors and libraries in DDA comes with troubleshooting any workflow problems during the pilot. Cal Poly Pomona University Library began a DDA program in 2011. The University community had shown a strong acceptance of electronic materials and spending on electronic materials had surpassed spending on print materials for both serials and monographs. Cal Poly Pomona’s library staff were already well-versed in integrating and maintaining electronic books in the system and were able to rework an existing batch load process for print monographs into their discovery record loading platform, so getting the records into the system was a fairly seamless process. They had some trouble cleaning the data they received from the vendor and were able to find an ingenious workaround in Excel to adapt to what they were receiving. They also noticed that because of exceptions in the discovery pool, several titles exceeded their $200 price cap and some titles caused duplicated materials they already had in the catalog. They were able to work out the first issue with their vendor and hope that a switch to Ex Libris Alma will allow them to generate a query to find all duplicates and remove them from the system (Vermeer, 2015).

Cal Poly Pomona used both homegrown and vendor-supplied solutions to fix problems that were occurring in their DDA workflows. The librarians there were already used to working with electronic materials, so they had a good head start, but vendors are often a good resource when beginning to troubleshoot issues, even if the solution will come from inside the library. Ohio State University Libraries also had a few vendor profile problems including an oldest imprint date of 2007 that went ignored in some cases because the ebook release date was new even though the publication date was older. In this case the vendor took responsibility and credited them for the purchases (Hodges, Preston, & Hamilton, 2010). This is another strong argument for maintaining open lines of communication with vendors through the DDA planning and assessment process. If anything goes wrong, they may be able to troubleshoot for future batches of discovery records.

There are several options that can help ensure that even as workflows merge, departments retain power over their areas. At California State University, Fullerton, librarians were able to use an existing approval plan to create their discovery profile, but selectors were still able to manually add titles to the DDA profile (Roll, 2014). This is particularly important if selectors are using collection development to build relationships within their departments because librarians can add faculty book recommendations easily to the discovery profile instead of purchasing them outright.

University College Dublin was able to retain mediation and increase the pool of titles for their catalog-integrated print and digital DDA program by inserting a link that said “click here to order this book” rather than letting patrons purchase materials outright (Tynan & McCarney, 2014). These hacks to standard DDA options can help libraries make this strategy work with their existing workflows and staffing arrangements and can be adjusted in the future as these variables shift.

Libraries have also used DDA programs to overcome temporary barriers in their workflows. St. Edward’s University Library had a year-long construction period that caused their print collections to be inaccessible so developing a workflow that would get materials into patrons’ hands as quickly as possible was critical. They moved to a digital-first acquisitions strategy, adopted a catalog-integrated ebook DDA program, and moved to Amazon as a vendor for print materials. Using these options, they were able to reduce their turnaround time from 3–4 weeks down to less than a week and ensure that patrons got what they needed during the construction. These workflow changes also influenced the way they purchased materials after construction, inspiring a digital-first access policy for all materials (Ferris & Buck, 2014). This represents a required workflow adjustment that had many benefits, especially for patrons, in a small academic library. Open Polytechnic in New Zealand had similar workflow constraints that caused them to move to DDA as a primary strategy. As of 2009, Open Polytechnic was the only online institution in New Zealand offering open and distance education (Kelly, 2010). The DDA program represented a significant cost saving over print, because the institution was frequently mailing out physical volumes for distance student access. This workflow adjustment represented a cost saving for the institution and improved access for patrons.

Each of these changes to workflow represents new challenges and new opportunities for collection development and management, but often libraries are juggling many different purchasing strategies and workflows at once. The University of Tennessee Library began to provide ebooks to patrons in 2001 and now provides many titles with a wide variety of acquisitions strategies such as package and single-title purchasing. Valeria Hodge, Maribeth Manoff, and Gail Watson presented how this complex environment functions and how they were able to overcome the many challenges of setting up and maintaining these strategies at NASIG 2012 (Hodge, Manoff, & Watson, 2012). This presentation was also reported in the Serials Librarian under the title, Providing Access to E-Books and E-Book Collections: Struggles and Solution (Hodge, Manoff, & Watson, 2013).