Instant fulfilment: the successful use of patron driven acquisitions to satisfy interlibrary loans

How to cite this book chapter: Moore, A. 2014. Instant fulfilment: the successful use of patron driven acquisitions to satisfy interlibrary loans. In: Woodward, H. (ed.) Ebooks in Education: Realising the Vision. Pp. 79–90. London: Ubiquity Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bal.i As ebooks continue to rise in popularity, the implementation of Patron Driven Acquisitions1 (PDA), with EBL as the vendor, has already proven a very successful model at the University of Sussex. It allows our users to decide on ebook titles that may become permanent additions to our collection. Using technology to make content more accessible, EBL offers a flexible access model, including free browsing (time-limited), non-linear lending (multiple concurrent accesses to content) and short-term circulation, with the fourth loan triggering an automatic purchase. With the economic realities of an agreed budget, we make only a subset of the entire EBL catalogue available to our users, carefully chosen with a focus on key subject areas as well as the most recent publications. In order to extend the use of the enormous repertoire of titles offered by EBL, we decided to pilot the use of the entire catalogue of approximately 450,000 ebook titles available through the EBL administrative dashboard LibCentral, to satisfy interlibrary loan (ILL) book requests. We were already offering desktop delivery to our users for journal articles through the British Library, and our aim was to extend desktop delivery to books, fulfilling book requests with ebooks wherever possible. The