Presented by Charles Hillen, Head of Acquisitions & Serials and Glenn Johnson-Grau, Head of Collection Development, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA
P4C x ELT = P4ELT: Its Theoretical Background (Kanazawa, 2024 March).pdf
Demand-Driven Success: Designing Your PDA Experiment
1. Demand-Driven Success:
Designing Your PDA Experiment
Charles Hillen, Head of Acquisitions & Serials
Glenn Johnson-Grau, Head of Collection Development
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA
2. Research Environment
LMU
5800 undergrad
Liberal arts and pre-professional
2000 grad
Largest are Education (M.A. and small Ed.D.) and MBA
Library
Historically modest print collections
650,000+ volumes
Substantial budgetary growth in electronic era
3. Administrative Support
Dean supportive of move to e-books
Strategic priority for the library
Feeling of languishing progress with e-book transition
Recent successful e-journal conversion
Built trust with Dean, faculty, LMU administration
Realized savings with relative ease
Met regularly with Dean through planning
Included Dean and Associate Dean in vendor meeting
Unique perspective, questions, and observations
Dean regularly updated the CAO and President
“Easy to sell”; makes sense to non-librarians
Demonstrated need shows us as careful stewards
4. Desired Outcomes
Agree with the obvious advantages: more “just-in-time”
content accessible (logical)
Conservative way to profile too-deep or too-superficial content
Compensates for collection weaknesses on the scholarly side
Provides discovery of titles in academic blind spots (pure
expression of patron need)
Immediate access to highly desirable content
Turn-aways, high use, and no use titles will inform collection
development policy design
For non-subject specialist bibliographers, pressure to learn
subtleties in content is lessened
5. Budget Picture
No specific fund for the experiment
Leveraged existing funds – think about days before
approval plans and assimilating that model
We committed to two weeks, come what may, based on
profiling process (selected representative high-use
subject areas)
Process for management is more important than fiscal
conditions
6. Choosing a Vendor
Existing ebrary Academic Complete subscription since
2006. Also had established relationships with
NetLibrary, Gale, Oxford, ASP, and others.
Of all other platforms for e-book use, ebrary’s well
regarded by Librarians on staff.
Purchase trigger model weighed and considered by
Dean and Library’s Management Council. Perceived as
conservative and generous.
License already in place. Only required an addendum
to initiate profiling.
7. Decision Criteria for Profiling Caps
Chose seven busiest, most populous disciplines across all schools:
Biology
Business
Communication Studies
Philosophy
Political Science
Sociology
Theological Studies
Research potential considered to be the most intensive based on
instruction class offerings, program size, and interdisciplinary
relevance.
Considered need for both current and historical research interests.
Program distribution included professional, science, social science
and humanities.
8. Profiling Process
Spent approximately 12-15 hours over two weeks.
In eBOP, used DDA eligible and subject term parameters to
gather titles in each discipline.
Obvious concern areas culled:
Reference
(handbooks, directories, encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.)
Identifiable popular (including How-tos)
Certain publishers (SparkNotes and others as discovered)
Price caps set by discipline (usually $150, but $200 for bio)
No way to look at every title; exhausted concerns and
stopped.
Ended up with approximately 26,500 titles.
Received weekly notification with spreadsheet via e-mail.
9. Records – Load Configuring
Because of the existing vendor relationship, staff loaded
the bibliographic records according to established
procedures.
A separate file was available for each discipline profiled
Discipline area = fund code
In order to identify the records within the catalog, we
used our ILS global update function to add a MARC 9xx
utility field:
941 $aebrary$bDDA$dyyyymmdd$ffund code$ntest
10. Monitor Expenses and Progress
Reviewed ebrary’s weekly reports
Addressed missed concerns as the experiment
proceeded (weak titles, non-scholarly)
Modest, steady and consistent purchasing each week
for over six months. (avg. 13/wk)
Surprises
Retrospective titles purchased often
Patrons gravitated toward sound scholarly content
Theology titles 2nd highest number of purchases!
Record enrichment concerns
11. Invoicing Workflows
Invoices arrive weekly, attached to e-mail.
Post-processing required:
Order record configuration (template)
Link to the ERM license record via item record (template)
Bibliographic record control data edited
Pay by credit card using e-mail template.
Handled by ER Assistant during the test.
12. Reporting (design)
Ebrary sends Excel reports weekly.
Easy to create a pivot table.
Excellent tool to focus the discussion between
Administration and Collection Development.
Easy to see and tally accesses, triggers, “turn-aways,”
etc.
Provides new perspective on users, their
needs, research content, etc.
Shows immediacy of use that cannot be obtained by
historical analysis of circulation.
13. Success! Why?
Budget lived through it.
Purchased desirable academic titles.
Learned that patrons want e-books in a fuller range of
content than is provided by Academic Complete.
A lot of the titles were likely to have been missed in print
collecting methods.
Discovery of content through full-text searching increases
chances of meeting research needs.
The Dean was happy.
14. Next Steps
We are comfortable with overlap of print and electronic.
We need time to figure out where duplication is
occurring and determine the e-only tipping point.
Over time, evaluate the nature of collecting from
metadata vs. full-text review…
15. Next Steps (cont’d)
Examples we would have and would not have bought in print
History of Chinese Philosophy (Routledge)
Owned in print also; copy currently checked out.
Core subject matter for curriculum.
Mr. & Mrs. Grassroots: How Barack Obama, Two Bookstore
Owners, and 300 Volunteers Did It
Not scholarly; journalistic narrative.
Vendor’s selection tool metadata is very minimal.
Amazon.com or other source for information is not persuasive.
Cheaper to buy than to ILL.
Advances in Parasitology, Volume 67 : Reflections on a Century
of Malaria Biochemistry
Scholarly, but more esoteric than would normally be selected.
Expensive ($203.00). Would have been low priority at best.
Advances in Parasitology, Volume 69 was used but not triggered.
Shows that use is not casual.
16. Next Steps (cont’d)
YBP/ebrary integration of DDA-eligible titles into print
approval plan profiling
Controlling subsequent editions.
Changed Reference titles to slip-only.
Single User Purchase Option preferred.
All publication dates included.
Involve liaisons/bibliographers
DDA eligible titles available for selection.
Training/discussion about e-preferred content.
For reporting and analysis: disciplines first, based on historical knowledge of active use; number of titles second, based on profiling content as best we could via eBOP; view overall expenses and number of titles purchased.