Keywords

Academic libraries; demand-driven acquisitions; ebooks; scholarly publishing; assessment; graduate students; faculty; undergraduate students

8.1 Are Ebooks Appropriate for Scholarly Use?

Ever since ebooks became available in academic institutions, librarians have been trying to assess how their faculty, students, and researchers perceive of and use these collections. The rise of ebooks in the 2000s led many academic librarians and faculty members to question the usefulness of ebooks for scholarship and examine the differences between how university communities use ebooks and physical books. The rise of DDA only amplified these uncertainties and the research on this subject is abundant and complex. Using DDA does not require the use of ebooks, as many interlibrary loan-to-purchase and informal book suggestion strategies show, but the rise of DDA in academic libraries and the speed with which it spread is strongly tied to the catalog-integrated ebook DDA offered by popular academic library vendors. Bernd Becker, in his recent examination of the research on ebook use addressed this issue, “while you can find several ebook studies that seem to be in agreement, you will easily find several others within the same scope that may provide results that are drastically different.” He goes on to explain that this is true, not only for ebook research as a whole, but also in the research examining academic libraries in isolation (Becker, 2015).

Part of the reason that academic ebook research is so difficult to analyze is the diversity of academic libraries. Different user groups, disciplines, and activities generate different preferences for material format. These preferences and the tools users favor to access digital content have also been changing. The landscape of purchasing and accessing digital content is also getting more diverse as technologies change. The ebook research before 2010 in academic libraries focused on how users were accessing and using these technologies and the advantages and disadvantages of the form over print. For example, Duke University conducted a usage study of their physical and digital book usage in 2004. Justin Littman and Lynn Silipigni Connaway examined 7880 titles that had both print and digital copies. They found that in this group of resources 3158 ebooks and 2799 physical books circulated during the study period and there was a large amount of crossover, 39% of titles with use circulated in both print and digital format. They also found that many of the titles that did not circulate in print also did not circulate in electronic format and that print and digital books had a similar percentage of titles that did not circulate and that those percentages were quite high at 64% for print and 60% for electronic. This research suggested to the authors that ebooks add value to collections even when duplicating print (Littman & Connaway, 2004).

A 2005 study from Louisiana State University found additional conclusions when they studied 2852 pairs of duplicate materials in print and electronic format over 13 months. During the study period, 29.27% of the print books were checked out and 19.60% of the ebooks were used. A smaller percentage of ebooks were used, but some ebooks in the study showed intensive use, many different users during the period when a physical book would only be checked out to a single patron (Christianson & Aucoin, 2005). This kind of intensive use was not observed in physical books. Ebooks in this study showed greater flexibility and turnover, which might be an advantage of the form, though the researchers at Louisiana State University also suspected that not all print use was recorded and that some data were lost through inconsistent recording of in-house counts.

This was also the case when the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted a study of print and ebook duplicates in the humanities. This was done by studying data from a DDA program, measuring print preference by cross-checking ebook titles for the availability of print for the same titles, and by survey of humanities scholars on their feelings about and use of electronic resources. They found that 58% of ebook use was for items that the library also held in print, which suggested to researchers that users preferred the print version. In addition, 15% of uses represented multiple users accessing the ebook titles at the same time which could represent classroom or group use, which is a function that is not well supported by print collections. Over half of the uses represented short sessions in which users turned 25 or fewer pages. Their opinion survey was conducted online and 73% of respondents were graduate students, the rest were either full- or part-time faculty. Most were between 26 and 40. The groups were split on the future of ebooks, half thought that most of their research would be conducted online by 2018 and half believed that most would still be in print. The respondents also showed format flexibility: 18.6% of respondents stated that they would always choose print if an ebook was available, 60.9% mostly preferred print but sometimes chose ebooks, 4.3% were totally format-indifferent, and 13.7% mostly preferred ebooks but sometimes chose print (Chrzastowski & Wiley, 2015). Along with these positive studies about the advantages of ebooks, there are also several studies that demonstrate user confusion and resistance to ebooks and shifts in the way we understand ebook usage.

In 2008, Arizona State University (ASU) Libraries conducted focus groups through ASU’s Institute for Social Sciences Research to determine faculty members’ knowledge and use of ebooks. Six faculty members from across several disciplines were interviewed by an Institute for Social Sciences Research moderator who was not affiliated with the library. Though the survey was small, it indicated that faculty members had significant trouble with technical difficulties around ebooks and did not think they were worth the time or effort (Carlock & Perry, 2008). The California State University E-book Task Force conducted a survey of users that were already accessing ebooks on NetLibrary in 2001 and found that, though these users were satisfied with the platform, 60% still preferred print (Langston, 2003). A study conducted at University College London of 1818 faculty, staff, and students found that 44% of users had experienced ebooks by 2006. Many ebook users in this study preferred to read ebooks in digital environments, only 13% indicated that they would print materials and read from paper. Respondents indicated that they liked that ebooks were always accessible and up-to-date, but found them difficult to read, annotate, and navigate (Rowlands, Nicholas, Jamali, & Huntington, 2007). This format flexibility coupled with frustrations about using ebooks might account for some of the high print preference percentages we see in the pre-2010 ebook literature. Michael Levine-Clark conducted a study at the University of Denver which found that over 60% of users preferred print, though 80.4% of users indicated that they might use electronic under certain circumstances (Levine-Clark, 2006). The University of Toronto recorded similar results, with 57.1% of users indicating that they preferred print books even when the same ebook was available, though most of the respondents indicated that they had and continued to use digital content for assignments (Dilevko & Gottlieb, 2002). This is an important point to note, because ebooks continue to generate fairly strong resistance among some groups in universities, but their utility and usage are undeniable.

Levine-Clark’s study at the University of Denver also found that participants read portions of electronic books rather than the whole thing. The ebook literature at this time is concerned with how patrons use ebooks, but with little information about how patrons use print books. The Duke University study showed that electronic resources show use patterns equivalent to what we might see in physical collections (Littman & Connaway, 2004). Electronic book collections are ideal for broad and quick, reference-like usage, but this is not unlike what we would probably find if we examined actual usage of scholarly physical materials; the image of deep, intensive, and long scholarly reading in research materials is probably less common than librarians imagine. Electronic resources may be used differently from print, but it’s just as likely that we now know how readers engage with materials in both formats. There’s no evidence to suggest that these materials are inappropriate for scholarly use and the only barrier to acquisitions might be patron preference, which erodes as ebooks become more integrated into library life.

Ebooks reached a saturation point in the personal market in 2010–11 and this was also the time that many academic libraries were experimenting with DDA programs. The research during this time period seems to show a growing format flexibility among students and faculty, who may read print books for some purposes and ebooks for others. The Colorado State University Libraries offered a DDA-centered ebook collection of over 162,000 titles in 2012. To assess this program, the Libraries developed a pop-up survey that was triggered whenever users attempted to access the full text of a single-title ebook through their vendor EBL. Cookies prevented the survey from being seen too many times by the same user. These were users who were already accessing ebooks at the point of need, so that may account for the enthusiasm, 29.22% of users indicated that they preferred the ebook format and 32.8% responded that they preferred print. The larges percentage of respondents, at 37.98%, indicated that they had no preference between print and electronic books (McLure & Hoseth, 2012). This breakdown demonstrates a growing format indifference that continues to grow in association with personal ownership of smartphones, tablets, and e-readers, but users’ preferences also continue to be shaped by the purpose of their reading.

A 2011 study conducted at the University of Mississippi suggests that format preferences and ebook availability may not be consistent across user groups. There are indications that ebook acceptance differs based on position in the university. Though most users had experience using ebooks, their survey revealed a higher than expected percentage of undergraduate ebook use and a lower than expected faculty ebook use. Students from this group indicated that they appreciated the immediate access to these materials (Herrera, 2012). These findings were echoed in an Ebrary survey from 2007 that shows that many faculty members may prefer print for their own research, but an overwhelming majority think that electronic books are fine for their students to use on research and assignments (Ebrary, 2007). Ithaca surveys of library directors and faculty members from 2009 to 2013 find that electronic journal content is already widely acceptable as the only and preferred method of access for this content, though library directors were ahead of faculty members in this belief. They also found that most faculty members read ebooks frequently over the past 6 months. More faculty members than library directors thought ebooks were important for teaching and research (Schonfeld & Houswright, 2013).

Stetson University conducted a survey with faculty members about their perspectives on ebooks. They found that 30–40% of faculty members were aware of ebooks in the library and had used them. An equally large percentage of respondents had not used ebook collections because they were not aware that the library offered ebooks. Faculty members were pretty evenly split about whether they liked teaching with ebooks or doing research with them. Particularly they liked the idea of e-textbooks because they were easy to assign to students and did not cost them anything to access. The faculty expressed interest in library ebook training and librarians conducted individual training with 17 faculty members as well as creating detailed LibGuides so that students and faculty members could find information easily about how to download and use the ebooks the library offered (Dinkins, Kirkland, & Poole Wald, 2014). Aside from the differences in format preference between faculty and students, there also may be differences in the format preferences of scholars in different disciplines. We certainly know that there are inconsistencies in the rate of ebook publishing between different disciplines. Humanities disciplines have a slower rate of ebook conversion than disciplines that have enthusiastically adopted them like business (Walters, 2012).

Carol Simon at Hofstra University examined the phenomenon of electronic resource preference among business students. Simon tracks studies from the late 1990s through 2010 that show a preference for electronic resources access among business students, even in the first years that libraries offered this type of material. She suggests that business students acted as electronic resources early adopters because of concerns about time scheduling in the library and the pace of research. Simon suggested that business students are constantly calculating the cost–benefit of doing research and the quicker they can have materials delivered, the better. She also noted that students are more likely to collaborate and share information that they have received in the library, so fewer students come to the desk, but that information is circulated widely (Simon, 2011).

Though business students have jumped on the ebook bandwagon, enthusiasm for these resources is not consistent across disciplines. Michael Levine-Clark studied format preference at the University of Denver in 2007 using a survey of Denver’s students and faculty members. The survey focused on ebook use in the humanities. He found that only 59% of respondents in other disciplines were aware that the library offered ebooks, but the percentage was higher in the humanities at 74.4%. Levine-Clark was trying to record sentiments about the use of ebooks in comparison with print. He found that about half of respondents had used ebooks at the library, but given the choice, 44% of participants said that they would always prefer print if given the option (Levine-Clark, 2007). Though electronic resources still represent acceptance challenges in the humanities, DDA has advantages for scholars in these areas because of the increasing need for interdisciplinary titles that may fall through the cracks in traditional acquisitions (Dahl, 2013).

Librarians at Colorado State University conducted focus groups with social sciences faculty members and students to gauge their use and opinion of ebooks. The library has gradually increased their ebook holdings and had recently embarked on the planning stages of a patron-driven acquisitions plan, but thought it was time to check in with their stakeholders about this increasingly common format. They conducted six focus groups made up of faculty and students from the social sciences: Education, Psychology, Human Development and Family Studies, and Social Work. Emails were sent to departments asking for volunteers to participate in these focus groups. The groups had positive things to say about e-resources including that they often used them and found them helpful in a number of applications, they particularly highlighted full-text searching and up-to-date content. Some of the concerns they highlighted were the inability to easily annotate and mark texts and the shorter access window for electronic texts since they could not check them out for long periods like physical books. Participants also mentioned that ebooks were harder on the eyes than physical items and may not be accessible to everyone equally because of unequal access to technology. The authors found a preference for print amongst their user groups, but it seemed generally esthetic rather than practical. Print books were a strong part of their identity and they had not adapted to thinking with electronic resources. This study was small and the focus group format can easily lead to groupthink, but they did highlight several benefits and drawbacks of ebook collections (Hoseth & McLure, 2012).

These drawbacks were also suggested by undergraduate participants in a study at the University of California, Los Angeles. Eighty percent of respondents indicated that they highlighted or annotated print materials, but a much smaller percentage (33.6%) indicated that they did the same with electronic materials. A total of 67.7% of participants indicated a preference for print materials with comments indicating this was likely because students felt that deep reading was easier in print, comments did indicate that students appreciated the cost and convenience of the electronic format. Most students agreed that their memory and focus were better with print materials (Mizrachi, 2015).

Apart from the availability and preferences of particular groups and disciplines within universities, device ownership, including the types of devices owned and their saturation in the community, also have an effect on the adoption of ebooks. Franklin & Marshall College serves an undergraduate population of 2400 students. The library has been working with ebooks since 2000, but integration of their records into the library catalog did not happen in earnest until 2012. As part of the process, they conducted a survey of users to determine what devices were owned in the community. Twenty-three percent of respondents specified that they owned a desktop and 59% indicated that they owned a laptop. Thirty-nine percent owned smartphones while 30% owned tablets or e-readers. A high percentage of faculty (67.7%) and staff (73.8%) had read ebooks in the past year with a smaller percentage (56.9%) of students reading ebooks. Very few indicated that they had read only ebooks in the past year, but most users had accessed them. Almost all of the respondents (95.9%) indicated that immediate access was important to them when using a book or ebook. This could indicate that, even if users had a preference for print, they may choose ebooks for their immediate access. Fifty-five percent of users confirmed that their preference would change if a book in either print or digital format were available immediately. A 2014 survey of the community determined that three-quarters of users had a preference for print, but there is a lot of evidence that this preference is meaningless from a scholarship perspective if over half of the respondents said they would abandon their preference for immediate access (Olney-Zide & Eiford, 2015).

A more recent survey from the University of California, Los Angeles studied how students access ebooks. A total of 390 undergraduate students responded to the survey. Most indicated that they accessed electronic course materials on laptops, though tablets including iPads and phones were also popular methods (Mizrachi, 2015). These results bear out a recent Pew Research Center survey, which found that laptop and desktop ownership among adults 18–29 was still very high, but had declined slightly from 88% in 2010 to 78% in 2015. Meanwhile, tablet ownership in this group has risen sharply, from 5% in 2010 to 50% in 2015 (Anderson, 2015). The Pew research suggests that students today own and use multiple devices and there is some evidence from library observations that students sometimes use multiple devices at once when working on research projects (Foster, 2011).

The literature on the appropriateness of ebooks for scholarly use is still inconclusive. There are some studies in which users unequivocally voiced a preference for print, but many others in which print and electronic books were used and valued equally or for different reasons. There is ample evidence that position in the university, discipline of study, access to mobile devices, comfort with technology, and the purpose for reading may all affect the desire to access ebooks and their usefulness in research. Though affection for ebooks does not seem to have grown, there is a suggestion that as researchers become more accustomed to using ebooks as part of their research process, format indifference and cross-format fluency are growing.

How researchers use book length content is still an emerging field of research because the way the academic community has traditionally used physical books is very difficult to study. DDA programs, especially those built around electronic books, can help solve some of these mysteries by showing us granular data about which titles are used and how they are used. These data have the potential to answer questions about the materials researchers need and the depth with which they use those resources. Many of the most revealing studies show the usage of electronic books alongside their print duplicates.

Thomas Mann’s 2001 article, The Importance of Books, Free Access, and Libraries as Places-and the Dangerous Inadequacy of the Information Science Paradigm, cautions that providing access to digital resources is an additional goal for library service, not a replacement for our old goals of creating meaningful collections and preserving those collections (Mann, 2001). As our assessment abilities improve and our choices grow, our blend may naturally skew towards digital resources and it may not represent a diversion from our primary tasks of growing and keeping good collections. Cases like that of Cal Poly Pomona University Library, which has been spending more on electronic monographs than print since 2012/2013 demonstrate a good alignment of user and selector preference (Vermeer, 2015). Librarians at Cal Poly Pomona were able to right size their ebook purchasing and create lean workflows with a well-integrated DDA program. Further assessment of programs like this and increasingly large studies will help clarify trends in the way ebooks are used in academic libraries and even though resistance from academic departments and some stakeholders is still happening, acceptance of ebooks for scholarship seems to be growing.

There is also a growing requirement for ebooks at some institutions. Distance programs at traditional institutions and fully digital institutions are both becoming more prominent and frequent choices for students. At fully digital institutions like the Open University, which serves 200,000 students in the United Kingdom, digital books are the only type of acquisitions. Though many institutions now have digital-first policies, digital only institutions still face some challenges in a still-maturing ebook market. Finding specific titles in digital format can still be a challenge and when these titles are available in ebook format, the institution often does not have a choice of vendor or license type (Duan & Grace, 2013). It is clear from the research that while ebooks have made an impact in academic libraries and will remain in our collections roster, there is still a lot of development to be done in this area, both in the industry options for ebooks in libraries and in the library assessment of these programs.

8.2 Shifting Paradigms in Selection

Should academic liaisons be selectors for libraries? As libraries improvise into the future, the best answer to this question might be “yes and …” We’re operating in complex and diverse collections ecosystems that encompass print, digital, and media formats and every mix in between. Academic liaisons have a serious role to play in advocacy and selection, but there are many ways to do this. In a DDA system it might mean creating, assessing, and managing a discovery profile that ensures that departments have access to a full range of the best and newest materials in the field, even if they only trigger a handful of them. A liaison, in their assessment of this system, might add titles manually to collections to achieve balance or solicit the input and active library participation of faculty members and graduate students with diverse research interests to naturally balance triggers.

Similar to the penetration of ebooks in academic libraries, the appropriateness and balance of different types of selection strategies may differ between groups and disciplines even within a single university. The duties of a liaison or selector librarian balancing DDA and manual selection is very dependent on the content being selected. In the humanities, the long-range insight of a liaison librarian into the cannon is invaluable while in high-turnover fields, like computer science, the book of the moment is often more important to users than the historical record. Providing this information, perhaps even using access rather than acquisitions strategies like short-term loan agreement may be the most helpful (Neville, Williams Iii, & Hunt, 1998). The understanding that academic liaison relationships bring to particular disciplines is just as essential in creating and assessing DDA programs as it is to traditional selection.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks demonstrated some of the difficulties of maintaining a traditional liaison model as well as highlighting some potential advantages of using data and DDA to make up for those difficulties. Their liaison model relied on high touch requesting strategies and relationship building with faculty, but graduate students were actually their biggest users and a significant portion of these users were relying on browsing the shelves rather than taking action to request newer, better materials. They surveyed users and liaisons about how the process was working and were able to gain a better understanding of how the liaison model worked within their community (Jensen, 2012). Much of the purchasing was still done from book reviews or catalogs, though emerging DDA programs could potentially replace that part of the program and give liaisons more time to build relationships with faculty and students in departments.

Another issue from the liaison program at the University of Mississippi focused on the increasing interdisciplinarity and its impact on the goals of selection, if liaison librarians focused only on collecting the best materials in their narrow area of study they might miss out on cross-disciplinary titles, even if they were explicitly requested by their faculty members. Though the idea of limiting DDA profiles to department members has been suggested as a budget control measure for libraries with separate allocations for each budget, the potential to lose out on titles that do not neatly fit into a particular discipline is a real threat (Herrera, 2012).

One of the major advantages of DDA programs at academic libraries is that they ensure support for the long tail of research. A good example of this is the interlibrary loan-to-purchase program at the Harold B. Lee Library of Brigham Young University. This program was created to provide materials for faculty members’ deeper research requests. They found that faculty members frequently requested items that were not available from any lending library, so purchasing these materials put fringe research items in faculty members hands quickly and efficiently (Alder, 2007). Brigham Young Library used a faculty survey to evaluate the success of this project. The ebook market enables more backlist titles to be readily available. This is valuable for end users and causes them to use and buy more obscure titles (Peltier & Moreau, 2012). This effect is pronounced in DDA, where large discovery pools might put top books in the same group as more obscure titles.

As early as 1996, librarians acknowledged that requests for materials were becoming more broad and that libraries had to develop new strategies to cope with this increasing demand. Interlibrary loan requests increased significantly between 1986 and 1994 as users were able to find more information about resources themselves using new bibliographic tools. This was coupled with a price increase for monographs and serials which reduced libraries’ buying power (Carrigan, 1996).

8.3 Extending DDA Programs in Academic Libraries

There are also many programs that build on the idea of DDA, but use the tools in very different ways. The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point used an interlibrary loan-to-purchase DDA program for providing journal content to faculty members. The content is provided mediated by librarians and not archived. A cost per use analysis of their databases had revealed very low use in some large packages. In one case the cost per use of a database package was $1133. The director of the library wanted to cut these packages, but ran into resistance from faculty members who said the packages were essential to their programs, despite low use. DDA gave the University the opportunity to cancel packages while still providing content as needed. There was a tremendous cost saving associated with this program and it was considered successful. A survey distributed with the articles found that almost all users found the service faster than interlibrary loan and that the document quality was better (King, Nichols, & Hanson, 2011).

Caltech did a very interesting pilot program of Kindle lending, which gave patrons unmediated purchasing power up to $25 over the 3-day checkout period. They tied the six pilot kindles to the same Amazon account for the trial. Because of the pricing structure through Amazon, the University was not able to physically limit the spending on each individual Kindle but had to charge patrons for any excess costs when they returned the Kindles. They arranged payment through “pledge amounts” added to an Amazon gift card. Despite not having fines for other types of overdue materials, Caltech decided to place a replacement cost block on patrons’ accounts if they did not return the Kindle within 24 h of its due date.

During the trial period (2011–12) the initial purchases were items that did not necessarily fall into the Library’s acquisitions goals like games, magazines, and children’s books. Caltech users added 482 titles to the collection and the total cost was a little over $10,000. The purchases were diverse, but the most frequently purchased items were popular fiction and study guides for exams. The most popular discipline-specific categories were physics and computer science. They found it difficult to determine what qualified as an academic purchase, but did find a fairly high duplication rate with print (36%). This could potentially suggest that students preferred the Kindle format to checking out an existing print copy. They also found a high rate of return borrowing. A survey during the trial found that a little over half of respondents were checking out a Kindle to read a title that was already in the collection. There is no indication that these are unique users, so this could potentially be a case of “mini personal libraries,” but it also could be evidence that users are purchasing items that other users want to read. The Kindle project was incredibly popular and considered a success despite setbacks.

The University of Nebraska-Omaha, has also experimented with Amazon’s Kindle and purchase on demand, but they integrated this workflow into interlibrary loan asking patrons if they would rather receive their interlibrary loan request traditionally, within a few days, or immediately via the Kindle. At first, 90% of users requested that their ILLs were fulfilled in the ordinary way. They thought this was because users were still unsure in 2008 about using and citing ebook materials in research. They had a slight clunk in that the librarian had to deregister the Kindle from the library’s account after purchase and before checkout so patrons could not purchase additional titles, but the workflow seemed to work well for them. They realized that this service worked even better in face-to-face desk interactions. Circulation staff were authorized to spend up to $50 purchasing a book for a patron and they could obtain it immediately and check it out right away. They created catalog records for each Kindle with a searchable list of the items that were loaded on it. With changes to the lending rules for Kindle, the library can now load titles on up to six devices (Neujahr, 2011).

DDA can also help formalize existing informal recommendation strategies. Stetson University started the practice loading discovery records into the catalog when faculty members requested them, so they would not be triggered until someone actually used them (Dinkins et al., 2014). These creative programs helped some universities deliver materials to users at a lower cost. The next section will examine a case study from one institution that dramatically lowered costs and streamlined workflows through a fully demand-driven structure.

8.4 Case Study: Teachers College, Columbia University

Teachers College, Columbia University, is a graduate institution focusing on education with 5090 students as of 2015 (http://www.tc.columbia.edu/abouttc/at-a-glance/). The Teachers College Library features a fully demand-driven acquisitions strategy including digital and physical DDA, catalog-integrated seamless DDA through YBP, on-demand article access through the Copyright Clearance Center’s Get It Now program, and a data-driven renewal cycle for serials. Delivery of materials and course reserves are handled through a proprietary software called DocDel that was built in the library and debuted in 2002.

DocDel functions as the library’s document delivery system for interlibrary loan and purchased electronic materials and also formalizes requests for physical copy DDA and delivery of requested materials. Users are able to create a request for any type of material and the library is able to track, deliver, and control the use of the material through DocDel. The fact that DocDel is secure and authenticated enables staff at Teachers College to upload many different types of materials for users, even reports and articles that specify personal use by a single individual in their license terms.

DocDel also acts as the course reserves module that enables the library to deliver materials directly into courses and control their use. Materials requested by faculty members and delivered in electronic format can either be requested directly as reserves or be added after the fact to course reading lists and students are then able to access assigned readings within the platform. This functionality has also been used to deliver secure links to students in courses for accessing streaming video and other small license paywall products. I spoke with Gary Natriello, Director of the Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College by phone and he reinforced the idea that DocDel had been created to help ease requesting for patrons. Instead of forcing patrons to understand the way we organized services and information in the library, DocDel gave them a single portal for requesting any material they could not readily find in the library and staff would do the magic behind the scenes to deliver it to them seamlessly (G. Natriello, personal communication, Jan. 29, 2016). Behind the scenes, staff members work to categorize requests for the acquisitions queue or the interlibrary loan queue and are also able to fulfill requests with links for material we already license directly through the platform. Requests added to the acquisitions and interlibrary loan queues are sent directly to the teams that work in those areas who deliver content or notifications back to patrons through the system once materials are obtained.

In the early 2000s, Teachers College made several changes to their acquisitions policy that helped shape the institution it is today. First, in academic year 2005–06, they halted all physical journal subscriptions and made the switch to digital-only publications. This was a bold move for the time, but the digital journal market supported the switch for Teachers College. They continued to maintain archives of bound journals until 2015, which were available through DocDel on demand. They also leaned more heavily into interlibrary loan requests for single articles at this time, but as journal content became more available online the interlibrary loan requests for these materials lessened.

In 2009 they switched to a digital-first acquisitions strategy, meaning that all newly acquired materials would be purchased in digital format if possible. This strategy was met with some criticism, but the clarity and simplicity of the message and the consistency with which it was enforced helped ease the transition for all stakeholders. Around the same time, Teachers College was developing online programs, so it was better for the growth of the institution if more materials were accessible to more users both on and off campus.

Teachers College moved to a fully demand-driven strategy in 2010. In our conversation, Gary specified that in their traditional acquisitions strategies, they were inadvertently discouraging requests from faculty members because the purchasing process was limited to a particular time of year and after the budget had been expended they had to refuse student and faculty requests until the next budget cycle. A switch to relying on patrons to suggest materials was a bold move, but by 2010 electronic access to academic journals and monographs had developed enough to support quick delivery of almost any requested item. And processing through the DocDel system for all requests made it easy to switch between different types of access styles. Materials requests submitted to DocDel could be fulfilled with existing library resources, moved to the acquisitions queue for single-title purchase, or routed to interlibrary loan. If materials were not able to be fulfilled through their assigned queue, they could easily be reassigned. For instance, if a book could not be borrowed using interlibrary loan, it could be rerouted to the purchase queue with the click of a button.

There were no restrictions on what patrons could order from the program, so like the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (Dunn & Murgai, 2014), a more subjective policy was used. Through our mediated program in DocDel a student request came in for materials that seemed inappropriate for our scope, we would send a message in the system inquiring about the research interest. If the student replied with anything plausible, we would purchase the book. This policy has served Teachers College especially well, since many materials that are outside the scope of most academic libraries, like graphic novels, and children’s literature, are legitimate research materials for those studying education.

Teachers College adopted YBP’s catalog-integrated DDA in early 2011, which complemented existing workflows including a purchase-preferred strategy for items requested through DocDel. Because Teachers College had been using approval plans for purchasing before this point, a switch to demand-driven approval was much more economical. The approval plans were easily translatable to discovery profiles and Teachers College initially loaded a backlist of deduped slip items from 2006 to 2011, this represented 5288 discovery records. Because DDA is the primary acquisitions strategy at Teachers College, short-term loans were not included in the triggering protocol. Though these would have reduced costs, it was important to maintain collection building and because Teachers College is a graduate-only institution with a relatively narrow focus, the interest of the community members was sufficient to use those titles toward maintaining collection building.

Fig. 8.1 illustrates spending on catalog-integrated DDA over the past four academic years at Teachers College. Spending in the first year met and exceeded budgets, possibly due to an unmet need in the community and the depth and breadth of education circulations noted by Michael Levine-Clark in his broad examinations of ebook usage data (Levine-Clark, 2015) As the program matured, spending reduced to expected levels.

Dana Haugh’s duplicate analysis of a sampling of titles from this collection suggested that ebook circulations were competitive and some showed hyper-use and more licenses could be purchased for a percentage of titles (Haugh, 2015). DDA has been a very successful strategy for Teachers College. Limited staff makes a comprehensive liaison program difficult, but smoothing this process with catalog-integrated DDA and form-based DDA through DocDel, as well as analyzing serials for evidence of use and acquiring or canceling them based on cumulative usage figures has helped ensure that faculty and students get the materials they need in an efficient timeframe.

Teachers College has a very specific set of parameters that helps this workflow function as well as it does. First, they have a comparatively very narrow and professional community. Though education is a diverse field, the options for excellent education serials and monograph purchases come from a limited number of vendors and providers. The staff is used to working with these providers to access materials quickly and seamlessly. Teachers College is also a graduate-only institution so all of the students are already in the process of gaining expertise in their fields and can select materials they need for research effectively. The other component is the Gottesman Libraries unit EdLab, which houses both library administration and an interdisciplinary team of developers, designers, and content creators who are able to create and care for the tools they use to provide library service. Embracing a fully demand-driven strategy is not a task that every library can take on, but in the right setting it provides a robust collection development strategy that provides researchers with absolute freedom to follow their interests.