OCLC has begun supporting demand-driven acquisition (DDA) through the WorldCat Knowledge Base. DDA pioneer and ProQuest subsidiary EBL will be the first ebook service to provide data, with sister company ebrary to follow soon.
Interest in DDA is well established, but there are still challenges facing adopters of these programs.
When a library has a DDA collection, “they want that exposed to the patron in the same way as something that’s already available, and that’s one of the struggles [OCLC members] were having,” said David Whitehair, senior product manager of metadata management for OCLC.
The two primary questions that OCLC was receiving involved managing DDA content in their discovery interface, and managing DDA in WorldCat. While libraries with DDA programs typically prefer that patrons remain unaware of whether an ebook is owned or whether it simply meets a library’s DDA criteria, library staff do need to distinguish between DDA versus ebooks that have already been purchased.
Whitehair said that the new initiative will make DDA ebook titles available in an automated way not only to WorldCat Local, but to any discovery interface via MARC record feed.
OCLC’s DDA support will also extend to complex consortial arrangements, allowing libraries that are part of an ebook buying group to expose the holdings that they own, along with DDA content from their consortium, plus any DDA content from a separate program specific to their library. DDA content from programs specific to other libraries will be excluded, and individual libraries can still set up and manage their own automatic resource sharing and interlibrary loan deflection policies.
“One of the things that we’re very excited about is that we can mix those [DDA models] together,” Whitehair told LJ. “For the individual library, what they will have represented is both the titles that they have individually in their program, along with what they have from the group.”
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