[Eril-l] DDA pool: disentangling DDA publisher exclusions from high STL charges

[Swindler, Luke]

Librarians need to disentangle questions about which publishers to exclude from concerns about high STL charges—especially in terms of not letting the latter unnecessarily influence the former.

UNC Chapel Hill Libraries chose EBL as its only DDA provider in large part precisely because it allows libraries to avoid excessive short-term lending charges while offering users a robust array of potentially relevant e-books.

Even excluding e-books with a list price >$250 from the UNC DDA pool, STL charges have varied greatly.  For a 24-hour checkout period, they ranged from <$1 to >$70 because of wide variances in both list price and publisher STL charges as a % of list price.  Given that 3 STLs trigger purchase, UNC could incur >$200 in charges before automatically buying an e-book, resulting in an extreme case in total cost of >$500 when the purchase price is added to the STL charges.

UNC faced with three options for eliminating expensive STL charges:

  *   • Preemptively remove all publishers that had a STL charge above a specified % of list price;
  *   • Preemptively remove all e-books from the DDA when the STL charge would be in excess of a certain % of list price on an on-going basis

  *   o Either of these options would not only eliminate titles with low STL charges in absolute dollars but defeat the primary DDA goal to “Improve support for the academic enterprise by presenting faculty and students with a large number of potentially useful and relevant e-book for possible acquisition” as well as add to UNC’s DDA transactions processing costs; or

  *   • Move to mediated purchase for e-books when STL charge exceeds an absolute amount.



UNC will be implementing a DDA configuration whereby patrons are presented with a “Request Library Purchase” button to click if she/he wants to continue reading the DDA e-book with a STL cost of over $50 beyond the free 5-minute browse period.  The system emails a notice to the Collections Management Officer indicating a DDA e-book purchase has been requested.  As a rule CMO will automatically approve purchase—and do so as soon a possible after getting request.

Luke Swindler


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Luke Swindler                               Collections Management Officer
Davis Library    CB #3918                        luke_swindler at unc.edu<mailto:luke_swindler at unc.edu>
University of North Carolina                           TEL (919-962-1095)
Chapel Hill, NC  27514   USA                        FAX (919-962-4450)
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"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most
intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin


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