[Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDAL usage and cost

[Swindler, Luke]

A well-planned DDA almost invariably is a cost-effective means of providing readers with relevant e-books.  Such is particularly the case when its goal is to improve support for the academic enterprise by presenting faculty and students with a large number of potentially useful e-books for possible acquisition, with the aggregate number and cost of titles in the DDA being well beyond what a library could ever afford to buy.  Moreover, based on data that ProQuest and YBP have provided UNC on the portion of the titles in DDAs that actually register sufficient use to trigger purchase, their number is relatively small.


The absolute level of DDA usage depends on its nature.  If the DDA is considered another niche for problematic titles where it would be difficult to predict need, then the level of usage will be relatively low and the short-term loan charges and auto-purchases triggered will be minimal.  Still, as a rule, the level of usage for even this type of DDA typically exceeds the overall level of circulation of print books that librarians select because of expected need.  UNC has this type of DDA, and for every $1M of e-books at list price in terms of financial exposure, the annual cost has been >5%.


Luke Swindler


On Sep 25, 2015, at 4:06 PM, Panak, Susan M. <Susan.Panak at arbor.edu<mailto:Susan.Panak at arbor.edu>> wrote:

I sent this discussion to my library director and he encouraged me to share our strategy.  Due to time constraints, this is not as refined as I would have liked to have submitted – any questions, please email me directly.

Several years ago, after participating in a webinar, the veil was lifted.

Our library has been, and still does, commit to allocating at the subject level.  However, when e-book purchasing became available, certain subject areas were designated as “e-book first preference”.  These areas mostly covered our off-campus programs but there were a few on-campus programs due to librarian preferences.  It was a way for us to start dabbling in purchasing individual titles in addition to the few subscriptions we had purchased.

For the “e-book first preference” subject areas, if there is an e-book available, the e-book would be purchased (unless there was an extreme difference in price – this may happen with textbooks).  I never did the statistics of how many of the librarian chosen titles were available as e-books, but it was significant.

Then the webinar that changed everything.  According to the research, a large research library who presented in the webinar indicated that only 25% of librarian-chosen titles were actually ever used.  And for this reason, this research library switched to investing heavily in PDA titles for their book budget.    The veil lifted – why do we not put our librarian selected titles on PDA instead of purchasing the titles?

So, that is what we did.  We put the e-titles that were initially being purchased on PDA.  We are still in the experimental stage – starting our third year. The first year we funded all the subject areas in our ebrary account with 25% of the actual purchase cost of the titles that were going to be purchased.  Ebrary is not concerned with our allocations to the subject areas, just the total amount on deposit.

The second year, we still continued our PDA process, allocated the 25% of the actual purchase cost to the subject lines internally for library budget reporting, but did not deposit the funds to our ebrary account.  The financial resources that were allocated to the subject lines in the library budget were then re-allocated to other areas in the library or to further extend the collection development budget.  This past year we were able to purchase flat screen TVs in our group study rooms.

Overall, I would say that less than 5% (or most likely lower if I compiled the information) of our titles using this process are purchased.  However, we also have had some cost savings with our ILL department and PDA.  We now put also ebrary titles on PDA instead of purchasing for ILL purposes.  It is interesting that there have been several occasions that a student will not trigger the title to be purchased when a direct link is sent.

Does anyone else use either of these processes for their PDA titles?


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