A large scale DDA consortial e-book project: What we learned during our first year

Abstract

The Five College consortium embarked on a large scale demand driven E-book project with EBL and YBP. The core concept of the project was to come up with a common set of titles to display to the consortium as DDA candidates, share in the short term loan cost, but any purchases would be done at institution level. Since purchases were not be done on the behalf of the consortium, specific permission was not needed from the publishers. This opened up the potential candidate list to anything carried by EBL. The consortium selected nearly 150,000 candidate titles, which were loaded into the local ALEPH OPAC, and various discovery solutions. 8 months in we dropped the candidate pool to less than 70,000 due to STL price increase. The workflow and interactions with EBL and YBP were automated, requiring minimal staff intervention. Data will be presented on usage and cost, and a discussion of the publisher short-term loan price increase this summer and how it is affecting the project.