Hilla Wait (Philosophy & Theology Librarian,
Bodleian Libraries)
What is DDA
 “User-led” selection of new books
 Utilises the instant accessibility of e-book
acquisitions
 Enables staff to test the level of demand for a title
before purchase
 Staff select the range (profile) of books on offer
 Time/cost-effective way to meet reader needs
instantly
 Readers need not know that the books are not
owned by the institution
Oxford e-book context
 454,000 e-books
 Oxford partner projects (EEBO, Google)
 Outright purchases (Past Masters, Blackwell Reference)
 Subscription subject packages (ORO, OSO, CCO, ACLS,
Cengage, Springer, Elsevier, 24x7)
 Pick&Mix (Ebsco; EBL; DeGruyter, Taylor & Francis)
 Chinese e-book collections
 Usage statistics (Counter)
 2,176,112 chapter requests
 Oxford’s total e-resources annual budget £4,200,000
 E-books annual cost?
 Devolved to subject budgets
EBL = Electronic Books Library
 Aggregator offering access to
multiple publishers’ e-books
 Purchase content outright –




own in perpetuity
Unlimited simultaneous access
(up to 325)
Non-linear™ Lending = multipleconcurrent access to all titles up to
325 ‘loans’ per year – renewing
automatically annually
Loan = 24 hours view / download
= 1 credit
Free Browse Period – 10 Minutes
owned / 5 minutes non-owned
 Books may be “borrowed” to
mobile e-reader devices
Mobile devices for EBL
 i-Pad
 i-Phones & android phones
 Sony e-readers
 Other e-readers using Adobe
Digital Library
 e.g. KOBO, NOOK etc.
χ Does not work on Kindles
Bluefire reader
on i-Pad
EBL reader requests
 Less than 10 requests
via this model in 2 years
 Is DDA the answer?
Buying from EBL
 Choose books
 Choose preselected





fund
Drop down to fund
code
Books available in 30
seconds
OCLC Marc record
loaded centrally to
SOLO
Charged to subject
budget
Very popular
The DDA project in Oxford
 Unlike other universities, no dedicated staff
 The DDA team
 Research - Jo Gardner (Health Care Libraries)
 Operation - Hilla Wait (Philosophy & Theology Librarian)
 Acquisitions and Payments - Ann Evans, Nicky
Mountfort, Zita Vellinga (C&RD staff)
 Cataloguing - Alison Felstead, Nathalie ChaddockThomas (C&RD staff)
 Techie bits - Nathalie Schulz, Andy MacKinnon (BLDDS)
 Oversight - Catriona Cannon (Associate Director,
Collection Support)
Research on DDA in other
UK HE institutions
 Newcastle University
 EBL, launched February 2010
 King’s College, London
 EBL, launched December 2010
 UWE
 DawsonEra, launched March 2012
 Case studies on JISC web-site
https://ebmotmet.wikispaces.com/Case_studies
 Patron-driven acquisitions : history and best practices / edited
by David A. Swords. De Gruyter Saur. 2011 ISBN: 9783110253016
Newcastle University




18 month project, launched Feb 2010
£80k budget at start
All subjects
‘Ebooks Team’ = 4 technical experts, and 8 liaison
librarians
 More than 110,000 DDA records loaded onto catalogue in
one week
 Purchase triggered on third loan request (revised to fifth
request)
 All requests mediated by acquisitions staff, forwarded to
subject librarians if
>£35.
King’s College, London
 Service implemented in December 2010
 All subjects, but main target groups are humanities
and social sciences
 Staffing: 2 members of technical team
 Created a ‘Scholarly Collection Profile’ of 90,000
titles
 Purchase triggered on fourth loan request
 No requests are mediated
 Readers are limited to one ‘loan’ per day.
UWE




•
•
•
•
6 month trial, launched March 2012
£5K budget at start
Limited to criminology, forensics, genetics.
Staffing: Acquisitions Librarian and 2 subject
librarians
Collection created by subject librarians, limited by
Dewey range and publication date
2800 records loaded onto catalogue
Purchase triggered after one loan request
Purchase mediated by subject librarians if >£15
DDA in other UK HE institutions:
Conclusions
 Huge variations
 Budgets
 Collection profile
 Staff
 Configuration
 Evaluation
 Need to evaluate , respond rapidly and adjust
frequently
 “Finding a sustainable funding method for PDA
remains a challenge”
Adapting DDA for Oxford
 Difficulties
 Scale and complexity of Oxford’s operations
 Membership of cataloguing consortia
 Large community of external users
 Materials budget devolved to subject librarians
 Avoiding duplication with existing e-book subscriptions
 Finding time
 Strengths
 Long experience with e-books
 Existing relationships with e-book suppliers
 Very expert technical staff
 Highly-motivated and diverse readership
 Aim
to test whether the model enables a more rapid and
targeted response to reader needs for new acquisitions
DDA In Oxford









Pilot scheme was set up for TT 2012
Initial budget - £5,000
Provided by Oxford’s existing e-books supplier EBL
Instant access including mobile devices
Books limited to recent academic publications (2009-2012)
in humanities, medical & biological sciences (33 publishers)
10,000 records added to SOLO
Lump sum paid up-front to suppliers
Readers encouraged to register to enable tracking of trial
books
Rental and purchase limited to University members
Acquisitions Workflow
 A separate distinct fund-code was set up with EBL to pay for these titles
 Unusually, we paid in advance into a Blackwell's deposit account
 Invoices were prepaid and added to ORACLE. These invoices were for
the initial pilot amount in advance. This was topped up as the project
continued and further funding was found.
 Full title lists of purchased items were supplied and acquisitions staff
placed retrospective orders on Aleph against each distinct purchased
title
 A dummy order was placed on the system to link to invoices for loans
 “Dummy packing-slip invoices” were sent on a weekly basis, and
invoices were added to Aleph, including VAT costs. As already prepaid
on ORACLE, these were then just scanned online for reference. There
were separate invoices for loans and for outright purchases.
 Subject librarians could continue to make direct purchases from EBL
against their own funds without confusion with the DDA pilot.
Cataloguing Workflow 1
 Oxford completed a technical profile for the supply of the MARC catalogue




records for SOLO
EBL provided a file of nearly 10K records, with URLs, based on the subject
selection profile
BDLSS loaded the full records into the Aleph Resources File, to keep them
separate from the main bibliographic database (and prevent export)
The records were published to SOLO, and clustered with records for the
print titles
The titles in SOLO were “switched on” by EBL at the agreed time, to
provide access to authenticated readers by clicking the URLs
 When purchases were triggered by readers, the same
mechanism as used for standard ebook purchases kicked in
Cataloguing Workflow 2
 A notification was sent to the ebooks cataloguer, and a second






catalogue record for each purchased title was made available for
downloading from OCLC
The ebooks cataloguer downloaded the records from OCLC and
prepared them for loading as usual
 These OCLC records were generally of better quality than those
supplied by EBL
These records were loaded into the main bibliographic database and
published to SOLO
This meant there were two records for the same purchased ebook in
SOLO for the duration of the pilot: an acceptable risk
The ebooks cataloguer sent the record control numbers and titles for
purchase to acquisitions staff
At the end of the pilot, the EBL records were removed from SOLO by
“suppressing” (but not deleting) them in the Resources File
These records can be unsuppressed if the project resumes, or deleted in
bulk from Aleph
Project Launch
 Deliberately low-key
 No publicity to readers (already experienced in using EBL
books
 Information to library staff
 Background to project
 How to identify the books (Bib02 system numbers)
 How to support readers
 Warning that the books would not be accessible to external readers
Access Model for DDA Titles
 Free Browse Period of 5 minutes per title
 First access = 24 hour rental =10% charge
 Second access = 24 hour rental =10% charge
 Third access = auto-purchase = permanent = 100%




charge
Total cost per book = 120% of normal e-book cost
Very expensive books required staff mediation for
rental or purchase
Potential limit on number of rentals per reader per day
Regular reports and alerts
The Reader Experience
 Bibliographical record on SOLO appears identical to other e-book
records
 This book is not yet available in print in Oxford
Accessing the e-book
At the end of 5 minutes browse
 The reader can choose to carry on
 And trigger a loan ($19.50 in this example)
Information to project staff
 E-mail to report rental
 Invoice report
Access to very expensive books
 Limit of £25 per rental
 Staff mediation for more expensive titles
 2 requests – both agreed within 3 hours
Adjustments during the Oxford
project
 Additional funding extended the project several times
 Introduction of registration option to assist with
analysis
 Switching on (and off) the loan/purchase cost display
 Setting limits for the number of loans per patron per
day
 Additional guidance to reading room staff (external
readers issues)
Time-scale and Costs
 Original budget
 £5,000
 Increase of £3,000 before project start
 Additional £3,000
 Final costs underwritten to end £5,713





Project ran 1 May-15 June 2012
At peak, averaging £3,000 per week
Final costs: £16,713.38
80 Auto-purchases
856 rentals
What can the pilot tell us?
 Analysis
 Age of purchases
 Print availability
 Time of access
 Reader type
 Subject areas
 Feedback
 Over time, analyse repeat use of purchases
Examples of usage of theology books
Auto-purchases in Philosophy & Theology
Reader
department
Reader
category
Analysis of auto-purchases by
subject
Theology, 7
Classics, 16
Social science, 3
Philosophy, 12
Modern Languages, 1
English, 17
Medicine, 9
History, 7
Analysis of rentals by subject
Theology
Social Studies
Philosophy
Medicine
History
13
Modern Languages,Biology,
11
Classics, 85
English
Classics
Modern Languages
Biology
Theology, 105
Social Studies, 38
Philosophy, 102
English, 201
Medicine, 69
History, 125
Usage example
 E-book rented while print copy was on loan
What do we know already
 The demand is there
 Way of spending money very fast
 Way of satisfying reader needs very fast
 Avoids paying purchase price for books which may
only be needed once
 Difficult to limit by subject without putting in a lot
more work on the profile
Accessibility versus availability
 DDA project moved 10,000 records from EBL catalogue to






SOLO
Full EBL catalogue accessible from OxLIP+ - 278686 titles
University members already had free 10 minutes browse per
title and a purchase request option
Requests over 2 years <10
Presence on SOLO is critical to usage
Confirms JISC emphasis on metadata
Have to mediate, either preselecting records to load or
mediating the purchase requests
Future plans: the debate
 A new DDA pilot:







Start with a lot more money
Newcastle have £180,000 p.a. (operating a mediated system)
Have a longer time-frame
Include excluded subject areas
Include a feedback request at the loan confirmation screen
Tighten up restrictions on loans per patron
Estimate for 6 month full pilot: £250,00-300,000
 Mediated request system





Load all non-owned EBL records onto SOLO
Use the request form for access requests once browse time has elapsed
Smaller budget
Requests processed within 24 hours
Loans or purchases?
 More purchases from pilot list