Collective Collection Building and DDA

Many librarians have advocated for the use of demand-driven acquisition (DDA) as an important money-saving approach in a time of reduced resources that target acquisitions we know will be used. In addition to saving money, the introduction of e-DDA presents an opportunity for a consortium to achieve three collection development objectives: continue to make the core publisher output available—and even more quickly and easily available; free up more of the collections budget to purchase unique content for the system across the campuses, not just at the larger schools; and allow campuses to review user activity to make systemwide, long-term decisions about user behavior and content not acquired through DDA. DDA can enable the consortium to meet the needs of the many right now as well as to continue to build some collections of depth for the system as a whole and the scholarly community writ large. Three University of California (UC) campuses: large (UC San Diego), small (UC Santa Cruz), and smaller (UC Merced) describe their experiences with using DDA in collective collection building and their hopes for its potential for their local and systemwide collections