Resource intensive acquisitions workflow policy

Scope: Policy statement on criteria for engaging with resource intensive workflows

Contact: Elena Feinstein

Units: Collection Strategy & Development, Electronic Resources & Serials Acquisitions, Monograph Acquisitions

Date created: 11/10/2023

Date last reviewed: 11/10/2023

High priority acquisitions categories

(Approved by Collections Council May 2023)

Some workflows, storage and access options, and funding sources may be reserved for acquisitions that fall into certain high priority categories, two of which are defined here. Any resource in these categories would also have to meet other collection development criteria and be evaluated as a worthy addition to the collection.

Immediate and specific need

Teaching: Immediate and specific teaching needs occur when there is a known course currently being taught or planned that seeks to use the resource. A course reserves request is the most appropriate workflow for acquiring materials required by currently offered courses. Building the collection to support planned courses or to augment materials for use in student projects would fall outside the reserves workflow but still may be considered for this category if it is tied directly to a specific, documented instructional need.

Research: Immediate and specific research needs occur when there is a known and urgent research use case for the resource. There should be a specific user or group of users associated with the request and alternative access possibilities (e.g., interlibrary loan) should have been considered.

Major resources

Some resources are so central to building the library collection and/or so large in scale that documenting specific user needs isn’t productive. These should be regularly and rigorously evaluated in other ways. While this is a subjective category, the following factors might indicate that a resource is “major” for the purpose of determining appropriate acquisitions workflows. When in doubt, Collections Council or a relevant subset thereof will clarify.

• Extremely high use: at least 10,000 uses (COUNTER-compliant strongly preferred) per year (if the resource is multi-part but acquired in a single transaction, such as a large journal package, this is use across the entire acquisition)
• Large financial investment: at least $35,000 (per year for continuing resources)
• Main/sole resource for a discipline in which there is active research and teaching at Duke

Policy application

(Approved by Collections Council July 2023)

Resources that require:

• Complex authentication work or
• Local hosting of digital content

Will only be acquired if they fall into the high priority categories described in this document.

Complex authentication

This applies to electronic resources that require significant additional labor in order to set up authentication, as determined by Electronic Resources & Serials Acquisitions staff. This may be because the vendor does not support our preferred method of IP authentication with remote access via EZproxy, or because the vendor does not allow us to provide access to the resource to everyone in the Duke community. The most common examples of such exclusions are Duke users who hold sponsored accounts (i.e., are not faculty, staff, or students) or are primarily affiliated with DKU. Prohibiting subgroups of users from accessing electronic resources either through the proxy server or through single-sign on (SSO) requires library staff to set up and maintain bespoke workflows, sometimes in collaboration with OIT colleagues. Please note that such setups typically take much longer to finalize than our preferred authentication methods, which may impact time-sensitive use cases and should be taken into account when communicating with users about expected access timelines.

Local hosting of digital resources

This applies to digital materials that aren’t hosted by a vendor and would need to be ingested and made available via the Duke Digital Repository or other Library-administered system. This doesn’t concern Duke’s own digitized collections or Duke authored materials in DukeSpace or the Research Data Repository, only acquired materials. The most common requests are for datasets, videos from independent filmmakers, eBooks, and digitized manuscripts.

Notes and use cases

Add updates below as the policy is applied and clarified through use.

• Duke's license agreement with HathiTrust allows for access to member benefits by Duke alumni, but HathiTrust does not support IP-authenticated access, only SSO authentication. Since we do not have procedures or workflows in place to support alumni access to e-resources using SSO, we will not pursue setting up access to HathiTrust member benefits for Duke alumni. - Virginia Martin 12/7/2023