Month: September 2025

Pragmatic Principles

Anth SinnottLeave a comment

It’s been a tough old year. Ditching out of 7 R&P deals at once naturally brings with it a whole host of stressful situations to navigate. Through all of this, an absolutely excellent piece of work (that I am very proud we achieved) underpinned a huge amount of our strategic thinking and decision making.

Prior to any budget cuts, the decision had already been made that we in the Library should work with external colleagues to co-create a set of Library Collections Principles

When we set out on this journey, the goal was to create these principles in a way that contained a pragmatic understanding of the realities of collection acquisition, whilst also aligning closely with our University values, as well as speaking to the needs of our wider community.

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EBA v DDA – Which is best?

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I posted on Linkedin a while ago about my overall views on EBA schemes, particularly in relation to DDA (or PDA) alternatives. I waffled on and ran out of words, happily now that I’ve set this blog up that is no longer an issue. So here is a post on all things EBA and DDA, happy reading.

What is an EBA?

An Evidence-Based Acquisition (EBA) scheme is a library acquisition model for digital content, most commonly e-books, where the library pays an upfront fee for a set period of time (usually a year) to provide its users with unlimited access to a large collection of titles from a publisher or aggregator.

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The Differential Model – A gold standard acquisitions workflow

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Everyone has an imaginary ideal acquisitions workflow, right…right?

If you don’t have your own, you can use mine. To explain, this is an acquisitions model that would fairly balance the need of Libraries to be selective and judicious in allocating their limited budgets to resources, whilst also accommodating the need for Publishers and Aggregators to make profits. This is not inherently a cost saving model, more of a cost reallocation model allowing Universities to direct their spend in a more strategic way

This is where the Differential Model comes in, a model that allows spending to be driven organically by need, ensuring our resources are directed to where they can have the greatest impact. The core principle involves re-profile spending away from speculative, front-loaded methods and towards a system that aligns with actual usage

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Ranking E-Book Licenses: A Tier List for Preference-Based Decisions

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We all know that e-book licenses can be intentionally complex and confusing. The difficulty often lies in choosing between licenses that seem similar on the surface. For that reason, understanding the nuances of different licensing models is key to making better purchasing decisions. This ranking system provides a clear hierarchy for the most common types of e-book licenses, helping you to make preference-based decisions.

Note: This post is a list based purely on the elements of the license itself. In reality, other factors like price and the presence of robust and configurable auto-upgrade systems often play a huge role in the final decision.

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