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ebooks@cambridge and PDA
This document contains a summary and full report on the trial of Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) for
ebook purchasing at Cambridge University April - May 2013. The trial was administered by
ebooks@cambridge and covered three subject areas using the dawsonera platform. It was financed
by part of the interest from the Connell Fund. While librarians were notified that the trial was taking
place, it was not publicised to staff and students.
Summary
Out of the 8,329 selected ebooks which were made available during the trial, 117 were purchased at
a total cost of £9,784.45. This gives a mean average price per ebook of £83.63 (inclusive of VAT). Each
ebook will be available in future to Cambridge staff and students via LibrarySearch, according to the
licence restrictions imposed by the publisher.
Time needs to pass before we can judge how useful are the titles purchased using PDA, and how this
compares with ebooks purchased by other methods, such as ordering titles by librarian selection and
reader recommendation, or as packages.
Running the trial has given the ebooks@cambridge service very useful experience in using the PDA
model. A number of issues which emerged are highlighted below.
Usage
With PDA there will no doubt be a myriad of reasons why our users have clicked on titles, wanted to
continue reading past the 5 minute preview and unwittingly triggered purchases. It will be interesting
to chart, through studying usage statistics over time, if some titles are obviously in-demand type
ebooks, and whether those popular ones are or perhaps more interestingly, are not on reading lists.
It will also be of interest to note if there are any titles which are only used once or twice. Can we
assume these titles are more likely to have been triggered by research students rather than
undergraduates? 27% of titles were purchased despite there being print copies in the UL, and some
Faculty and College libraries; does this indicate a real need for an ebook copy to supplement the
already popular and well-used print copies, or is this a sign of a user taking the easy option of
browsing through the ebook first to ascertain whether to make the effort to go and borrow a print
copy? The use of the PDA purchased ebooks should be compared with the use of those purchased
through other methods, possibly in January 2014. It would also be interesting to compare these
figures with those for the issue of print copies, where held.
Without further research, we cannot say yet what the value of these ebooks will be, or how this
relates to the value of print copies. Anecdotal evidence from the Education Faculty Library is
conflicting. When a couple of their readers expressed an interest in certain titles, staff encouraged
them to persist with reading in order to secure the purchase of the book, which suggests the
purchase was of value, but when a reader who had suggested a title for purchase once the trial had
finished was asked if he would be happy with a print copy, he replied “at the moment I do not need
this book”. This suggests that some, at least, of the PDA purchases were titles stumbled upon and
browsed out of passing interest, very much like browsing the shelves of print books. It is also possible
that readers viewed the ebooks before deciding to make the journey to a library to borrow a print
Jayne Kelly, ebooks Administrator
June 2013
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copy.
Catalogue
During the trial, access to the PDA collection was provided on the supplier’s platform and through
records loaded into the LibrarySearch catalogue. Adding a record to the catalogue traditionally
implies that whatever it refers to has been acquired by the library. However with PDA there is no
certainty that the ebooks which appear in the catalogue will remain there when the purchasing
period is over. This is a particular issue for academics who rely on the continued availability of texts,
and for librarians who are checking the availability of material on reading lists. Some method of
identifying in the catalogue which titles are included in a PDA offer would be useful. Alternatively, we
could ignore importing catalogue records until a purchase has been made, in which case the
availability of the trial collection would have to be promoted.
Duplicates
The issue of avoiding duplicating ebook purchases needs to be considered. Every effort was made
during the trial by the ebooks@cambridge team to avoid purchasing an ebook which we already held
and, despite extensive list preparation and checking, duplicates were discovered as a result of titles
appearing in more than one subject profile and in three cases duplicates of existing purchases were
made (subsequently withdrawn and credited). Avoiding such duplication occupied considerable
administrative work before and during the trial and is not likely to be scalable.
Should we therefore accept that duplication in ebook purchasing and associated costs is inevitable,
or should we ensure that it is kept to a minimum? There is a cost either way. Also, an issue this trial
did not touch on, is the extent to which we balance ebook acquisitions with existing print holdings,
i.e. should we concentrate on purchasing ebooks of titles not held in print? If so, how?
Purchase orders
Purchase orders and invoices had to be created manually in Voyager after purchases were triggered.
This was labour intensive and would be far more so if the PDA budget was substantially larger.
Vendor error
Potential purchasing was compromised in the first two weeks of the trial due to an error by
Dawsonera which meant that readers could only preview the first 50 pages of any title within the 5
minute previews. We had assumed this was standard and how the PDA should work. Apparently not,
as when dawsonera realised they had not switched on the correct set up and changed this, our
ebooks suddenly started allowing users to access the whole ebook content. I queried this, thinking it
was a bug and found out that our users should have had full-text access during the previews all
along. I would have preferred dawsonera to have admitted their mistake and informed us when they
changed the settings, rather than having to go chasing for an explanation. Dawson also halted the
trial before the budget was exhausted, leaving a £300 balance. This possibly deprived the trial of
further PDA purchases, but the balance has been used to purchase in demand ebooks.
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June 2013
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Full report
PDA (Patron Driven Acquisition) allows a batch of selected ebooks to be made available to readers on
a suppliers’ platform, either for a predetermined period of time or until a specified budget has been
exhausted. To facilitate discovery, a record for each ebook is added to the library catalogue. Readers
can access all the content and trigger purchases by specific actions. When the limit of the budget is
reached, or the period of availability ends, the purchased content only remains available and access
to the remainder is switched off.
Preparatory work:
June 2012
Following agreement by the ebooks@cambridge Advisory Group, a talk was given to Cambridge
librarians by a guest speaker, Sarah Thompson, Content Acquisition Librarian at the University of
York, summarising PDA models offered by academic library ebook vendors.
November 2012
At a meeting of the Connell Fund group of librarians, together with Jayne Kelly and Sarah Stamford of
the ebooks@cambridge Advisory Group, the decision was taken to proceed with a PDA trial in 3
subjects: Archaeology & Anthropology, Education & Philosophy. The budget was set at £10,000
sourced from the Connell Fund interest 2012-13. The other half of the Connell Fund interest was set
aside for purchasing individual ebooks as requested by the SPS and Psychology Libraries.
It was decided not to publicise the trial, other than to inform Cambridge librarians that it was taking
place via the lib-list email. With limited funding the group did not want purchasing to be “hogged”
by an individual or particular interest group.
Vendor
The Connell Fund librarians and the ebooks@cambridge team selected dawsonera for the trial,
following a meeting with their representative, Cheryl Fellows. Dawsonera was already an
ebooks@cambridge supplier, with a good track record of PDA provision to other universities.
Purchase triggers
It was decided to use the following two triggering options in combination
• “Continue Reading” – a user reading an ebook would be asked after 5 minutes if s/he
wanted to continue reading. If “yes” a purchase was triggered.
• “Minimum number of Previews” – Each ebook could be “previewed” for up to 5
minutes. Each ebook could be previewed three times without charge; at the 4th attempt a
purchase was triggered.
An option was also included on the platform to “Suggest a purchase” which sent an email to the
ebooks Administrator. Alternative triggers, such as the rental model, were considered but on this
occasion discarded.
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Profiling and selecting the range of ebooks for the trial: December 2012 - February 2013
Excluding owned ebook content
It was necessary to exclude from the trial any ebooks which had already been purchased. In liaison
with UL Digital Services staff, an Excel spread sheet with over 18,000 line items was provided to
dawsonera. This necessarily included the isbns for the print copies of the titles which corresponded
to our ebook holdings (it is not possible to match on e-isbns as they can be unique to each ebook
supplier). Each print book generated multiple listings, due to the multiple isbns in the catalogue
records.
The dawsonera model would perhaps work better for those libraries who use 1 bibliographic record
and different holdings records for their print and e content.
Profiling
Cheryl sent a PDA profile template for completion by the participating Faculty librarians, Aidan Baker,
Angela Cutts/Louisa Brown and Jenni Lecky-Thompson. This profiling allowed the subject librarians
to ensure that the ebooks included in the trial would be those which would normally be appropriate
purchases for their faculty staff and students, and to exclude the rest.
The criteria included in the initial selection were: English language; LC or Dewey code; excluded
isbns; publisher and imprint; readership level; maximum price; publication date.
The 3 completed templates were sent to dawsonera on the 20th of December.
At this stage we learned that dawsonera could only deal with 1 subject profile at a time, so we
decided that they should send the list of titles in the following order:
1. Philosophy
2. Education
3. Archaeology & Anthropology
The initial lists of titles came with Dewey class marks (some with LC codes where provided by
publishers). At this stage some date and price limits were imposed (on advice from dawsonera):
Philosophy: no date or price limits.
Education: no titles published pre 2008: £200 upper price limit
Anthropology/Archaeology: no date limits: £200 upper price limit
The profiles were further refined as follows.
1. The Philosophy title list contained 6,233 titles. These were sent to Jenni and through a process
of gradual refinements (listed below) and quite a few emails back and forth to dawsonera this was
whittled down to a final selection of 2,514 titles.
a) a price limit of £200
b) excluded Dewey classes: 100-109.9, 133-139, 174.2-174.9 & 180-189
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c) excluded 'Technical', 'General' & 'College' readership levels
d) excluded anything not in the English language
e) excluded any titles published by CUP (as the promised Credit fund should be used in future to
purchase ebooks on CBO)
Jenni also removed about 300 already owned titles from the list. Jenni reported that the profile
checking process was 2 – 3 hours of work in total. The final list was returned to dawsonera and the
resulting MARC records were loaded into the FTP space for collection. There were issues with the
MARC record files which are detailed later on.
2. The Education list arrived next and contained 3,905 titles. Louisa refined the LC classmarks
slightly and, with the removal of a few extra titles the list was finalised at 1,928. The refinements
were as follows:
a) price limit of £200
b) only included Dewey classes: 100, 150-153, 155-158, 207, 300, 370-379, 307, 507, 607, 707, 780.7
& 907
c) excluded 'Technical' & 'General' readership levels
d) excluded anything not in the English language
e) excluded any titles published by CUP (as the promised Credit fund should be used in future to
purchase ebooks on CBO)
f) no titles published before 2008
Louisa spent a minimal amount of time on the profiling as she and Angela wanted to keep the range
of titles quite broad. The Education MARC records were then supplied to the FTP server for
collection.
3. When the Archaeology & Anthropology list arrived it contained 22,000 titles, this was even with
the £200 price limit and excluding all CUP items. Thanks to Aidan’s efforts this total was refined to
3,887 titles, the exclusions follow:
a) price limit of £200
b) ) only included Dewey classes: 069, 133, 155, 170, 291-299, 300-307, 909-919, 930-942, 960 & 972
c) excluded 'Technical', 'General' & ‘College’ readership levels
d) excluded anything not in the English language
e) excluded any titles published by CUP (as the promised Credit fund should be used in future to
purchase ebooks on CBO)
f) no titles published before 2006
g) restricted publishers to not many more than those included in the Haddon’s classification backlog
Many of the titles included in the trial, especially in the Archaeology & Anthropology profile, were
interdisciplinary, e.g. titles in History, Art, International Studies and Sociology were purchased
alongside those of a more defined anthropological or archaeological nature.
Aidan noted that some publishers that he would have liked to have seen included were missing from
the profile. Dawsonera have been advised of this. A list of these is included at the end of this report,
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in Appendix A. Aidan spent approximately 3 hours working on the profile.
MARC catalogue records
The MARC files containing the 8,329 records for the PDA were sent as .usm files and very large ones
at that, so initially we had to request that dawsonera split the records so that they could be opened
in MarcEdit. Then I asked advice about converting .usm to .mrc for loading as this was not proving to
be simple. I had requested .mrc files from dawsonera but they maintained that the files could be
converted to .mrc by simply changing the suffix on the files. While at UKSG in early April I discovered
that other libraries had requested files in .mrc and dawsonera had provided them, so I had a word
with Cheryl Fellows on the Dawson stand and the correctly formatted files turned up in my inbox the
very next day!
All 9 file batches were checked in MarcEdit for correct coding; work was need on the 006 field, a 948
field was added along with holdings. The records were loaded on the 23rd and 24th of April and were
all searchable in LibrarySearch by lunchtime on the 25th. A selection of URLs were checked to ensure
they linked to the ebook content correctly.
Dawsonera reported that enhanced MARC records are sent as those received from the publishers for
the PDA were not always of a high quality, but at this stage there has seemed no need to load the
enhanced versions.
Dawsonera went live with the PDA trial at 4pm on Thursday 25th April.
During the trial: April - May 2013
The trial began on 25th April and finished on 20th May, and was run at this time of year because we
were ready to go by then, not because we had decided this was the optimum time. However, the
librarians felt that the exam revision period was an appropriate time as those taking exams would be
likely to be consulting books which were essential reading.
The total budget for spending on titles was £8,750 (£10K + 5% discount – 20% VAT).
The only unowned content our users could now access on dawsonera were the 8,329 titles that
comprised our subject profiles.
Almost immediately the trial began we started to spot duplicates in the collection, 15 of these were
reported to dawsonera who removed them from the platform. The ebooks@cambridge team
removed 40 catalogue records from the ERDB (LibrarySearch). Some of these records were a result
of titles appearing in more than one subject profile, thus generating 2 catalogue records but only one
incidence on the platform. Every time we were notified that an ebook in the trial had been bought,
we checked that the title was not one we already owned as an ebook; and this effort was justified in
3 cases by our discovery that an existing purchase had been duplicated.
Number of hits
464 titles were previewed (or hit) during the trial period; of this 117 titles (25%) were purchased. The
breakdown of previews is shown in the table below. From this we can deduce that 3 titles were
purchased by the “Minimum number of previews” trigger and 114 by the “Continue Reading” trigger.
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1 preview
2 previews
3 previews
4 previews
Total titles
No. of titles
385
60
16
3
464
Percentage
83%
13%
3.4%
0.6%
100%
Purchasing and Orders
Order confirmations were sent to the ebooks@cambridge team email from dawsonera throughout
the day (on the hour) and the electronic order confirmations containing the ebook URLs were sent in
the evening.
The first purchase was triggered within an hour of the trial going live, and continued steadily until the
fifth day when the trickle became more of a stream and 7 titles were triggered, a likely outcome
given that the triggers for purchase were repeated instances of reading. From then on there was a
constant flow of PDA batch confirmations arriving from dawsonera. The trial ran over 5 calendar
weeks and during weeks 3 and 4 the triggers reached over 40. Overall Mondays and Tuesdays were
the busiest purchasing days, Saturdays the quietest. The purchasing peak was Tuesday 7th May with
11 ebooks purchased. Just under 67% of purchases were generated in the afternoons and evenings.
Purchases by date
12
10
8
6
Purchases
4
2
0
During the course of the trial we were invoiced for 3 ebooks we already owned through MyiLibrary. I
am pleased to report that dawsonera were happy to remove these titles from the platform after a
purchase had been triggered, we were not invoiced for the cost.
Invoices
Invoices and enhanced Marc records for purchases were emailed weekly; this could have been twice
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weekly if required. There was a blip with invoicing of the earlier titles and dawsonera seem to be
playing catch up with these, there remain 2 titles still to be invoiced.
Feedback from librarians and users
Feedback was limited as the trial had not been publicised beyond informing librarians. Four queries
were received from Faculty librarians : one asking about record removal once the trial was finished,
another one querying the 50 page limit for the preview (on behalf of a student) and another
querying why the 50 page limit has disappeared.
There was also a query about checking our holdings in the case of reading lists. With the unowned
content in LibrarySearch it would be necessary to click on beyond the catalogue record and into the
dawsonera platform to check whether any title was purchased or not. Once there, if a title is
highlighted in green then we own it, if purple we don’t. An email to ‘liblist’ was sent mid-trial to
highlight this issue.
Suggestions for purchase
7 suggestions for purchase were received from users during the trial, 4 of these titles were
subsequently purchased as part of the PDA. Any purchase suggestions are sent in weekly batches by
dawsonera; users have to type in their email address and they can leave a short comment if they
wish. All users were emailed a response which outlined how they could continue reading the fullcontent if they wished and 2 readers responded to the emails to express their thanks.
After the trial
The PDA trial ended with the purchased of the 117th ebook at 02.27am on the morning of Monday
20th May, it had been live for 26 days.
Removing un-purchased content
I cannot yet report back on this step of the process. I was told that dawsonera will send me a series
of MARC files which I can use to delete the un-owned titles; I have since discovered that there is a
standard 6-8 week wait for these files but there has been no explanation to justify this length of
delay.
I have received 9 suggestions for purchase since the end of the trial. These are being passed to
appropriate Faculty and Departmental Librarians for information and if necessary for purchase where
budgets allow.
A meeting between the Connell Fund librarians, Jayne Kelly and Sarah Stamford was held on 20th
June to review the trial. Those attending had been circulated with full details of the purchases,
usage statistics and the budget for 2012-13. The meeting proposed a further PDA trial should be
considered, possibly with a different supplier and subject areas, and at a different time of the
academic year. One College reports having used the list of PDA purchases to identify three titles for
purchase in print for their library.
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Conclusions
Analysis of purchases
Subject coverage
The spread of purchases across subject profiles is shown below (please note that 1 title appeared in
the Arch & Anth and Education profiles so has been counted twice).
Subject profile
Archaeology &
Anthropology
Philosophy
Education
Total
Number of titles
purchased
72
Number of titles in
trial
3,887
31
15
117
2,514
1,928
8,329
Costs
£9,784.45 was spent on 117 titles, and the average cost per title was £83.63. The cheapest ebook
cost £11.39 and the most expensive cost £162.11, in the context that there was a £200 price limit on
profile titles. 32.5% of titles cost over £100. A graph showing the range of prices is detailed below.
Price (inc. discount & VAT)
180
160
140
120
100
Price (inc. discount & VAT)
80
60
40
20
0
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
Print holdings
The graph below shows the extent of print holdings for titles purchased as ebooks in the trial. Of the
117 purchases, only 10 were not held in print somewhere, 33 were held in the University Library
only.
As we are not able to track which users purchased which titles, we can never really know which type
of student or academic staff or other purchased these titles, the only surety is that they had a Raven
login.
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Print holdings
FDL & College
UL, FDL & College
UL& FDL
FDL only
Series1
UL & College
College only
UL only
No print copies
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Purchase model
The credit model accounted for 113 of the purchased ebooks, the other 4 were sold as managed
user access which allows a designated number of simultaneous users at once, and the default seems
to be 3 users.
Publisher coverage
Routledge publications proved the most popular with 31 purchases (26.5%), with Palgrave
Macmillan (12%), Wiley-Blackwell (10.3%) and Oxford University Press (10.3%) following behind. A
pie chart illustrating publisher distribution is shown below. “Other” includes those publishers with
less than 3 titles triggered. There were no Cambridge University Press titles included in the profiles.
Publisher coverage
3.4%
3.4%
Routledge
2.5% 2.5%
Palgrave Macmillan
3.4%
4.3%
Wiley-Blackwell
26.5%
Oxford University Press
5.1%
Other
Duke University Press
6%
12%
10.3%
10.3%
10.3%
Bloomsbury Continuum UK
Boydell
Springer Verlag
Sage
University of Chicago Press
Pluto Press
Open University Press
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Appendix A.
A list of publishers noted by Aidan Baker as missing from the Archaeology & Anthropology subject
profile.
Archaeopress
British Academy
British Museum
Columbia University Press
Editura Mega
Harvard University Press
Manohar
Max Planck Institute
Mora Ferenc Muzeum
Norton
Oxbow (David Brown)
Pabst
Peeters
University of Arizona Press
University Press of Florida
Wachholtz
Wits University Press
Jayne Kelly, ebooks Administrator
June 2013