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Rounding Out 2013: News from Collection Management

by lener, posted on December 21, 2013

University Libraries will be acquiring the Cambridge Journals Digital Archive, an archive containing both STEM, and Humanities-Social Sciences journals.  In total, our users will enjoy 255 titles from this package.  A title list can be downloaded from the Cambridge Journals Digital Archive.  Additionally, we will be reviewing recommendations from the Sci-Tech and BHSS teams and hope to add purchases from these lists.  Once both teams complete their reviews, we will provide a list of all new acquisitions since July 1, 2013.

ASERL has just completed its first year with an EBL ebook deal where all ASERL institutions receive a 2% discount for any EBL purchases or short-term loans.  To continue the deal in the future, ASERL members needed to spend collectively $1,000,000 in ebooks or short-term loans for the 2013 calendar year, and we have confirmation that we have surpassed the goal.  Total savings for all schools combined equals roughly $27,000. Not too shabby!

At the Charleston Conference, Ed and I gave a presentation on the performance of DDA (Demand Driven Acquisitions) since we first started the pilot project in May 2012.  For FY 2013, we added a total of 12,805 DDA records to Summon, excluding any VIVA DDA titles.  With those 12,805 titles discoverable, patrons triggered 1204 short-term loans, and almost 70% of those titles were unique, or just experienced 1 short-term loan.  Only 31 titles saw enough short-term loan activity to be purchased outright.  DDA activity has remained steady since FY14 began and we hope to have mid-year report out soon.  Not surprisingly, business, education, and technology titles triggered the biggest share of the usage.

Amongst all this activity, collections staff have also been gathering ebooks usage and cost data in order to understand better the performance and print overlap of ebook packages.  Additionally, just like last January, our team will begin downloading COUNTER journal usage reports so that we can analyze our journal subscriptions.   In other words, more analysis to come in the New Year!