Acquisitions

With evidence based acquisitions, we pay an annual fee (e.g., $7,000 in the case of Cambridge) to a provider (a publisher or 3rd party vendor), then get access to a very large collection. At the end of the year, we convert some titles to permanent ownership ($6,300 worth of titles in the case of Cambridge). Since the provider gives us a spreadsheet of the most used titles, we typically convert the most used titles to permanent ownership (thus our “purchases” are based upon the evidence of use). Then, we pay the annual fee for the next year.

Evidence based functions like a lease (we get access to a lot of titles) and like a purchase (we get permanent access to some titles and are acquiring capital assets). 

We have EBA contracts with Wiley, Francis and Taylor, Cambridge & Brill. 

Right now, EBA contracts provide books to the Original DTL only.

Sometimes we are able to purchase book collections directly from publishers and the publishers always give us a discount from retail (the discount vary widely from 90% to 10%, largely depending upon the age of the content). 

We routinely buy collections from de Gruyter, Bloomsbury, Duke, and more than 30 university presses.

Publisher Purchases are permanent acquisitions.

Currently publisher purchases go only in the Original DTL. 

PDA works a lot like EBA, except we do not establish preset annual spending. Instead, we activate a long list of titles and the titles which are used 2 or more times are automatically purchased (and we are billed for that acquisition, usually at full retail).

We have a PDA with Rittenhouse for a lot of counseling and psychology content.

The content which we buy become permanent acquisitions and are added to the capital assets.

This content only goes into the original DTL.

The DTL large packages from several third party vendors. These are strictly annual contracts and never become capital assets. If we end the lease, we lose all access to the content. Nearly all journals are acquired in this manner (because this is the only way to get article level indexing for journals). 

The leases give us vast amount of content at relatively low cost per use (we pay ProQuest $55,000 annually for access to about 200,000 titles).

We currently lease databases from ProQuest, Project Muse, various JSTOR collections, CREDO and several others.

ProQuest will place all of our content in original DTL and DTL2. Others are still under negotiation.