The evolution of an e-book demand-driven acquisition programme at Swinburne University of Technology

Abstract

In 2006 Swinburne University of Technology became the first library in the world to launch a large-scale implementation of a demand-driven acquisition (DDA) programme for e-books. At that time, the 34,000 e-books made available through the EBL DDA programme accounted for almost all the e-books available from the Library. In the intervening years the demand-driven collection has grown to almost 300,000 e-books but these now form only a component of a much larger collection of 765,000 e-books in total, acquired through a range of acquisition models. When changes in publisher charging models caused a large increase in short-term loan-based DDA expenditure from late 2014, the library took action during 2015 to put the DDA programme on a sustainable footing. Further changes were introduced in 2016 when Swinburne became one of the launch customers for a new DDA model developed for ProQuest’s Ebook Central platform called Access-to-Own (ATO). This paper describes the evolution of DDA at Swinburne and the early experiences of using the new ATO model.