PDA stands for Patron Driven Acquisition. The key feature of PDA is being able to provide a broader set of titles for your patrons – without having to purchase all those titles up front. With the PDA model, no distinction is made to your patrons about whether or not you’ve already purchased a title – they just know it is a title you have decided to make available to them.
You can restrict the set of titles you decide to make available in your PDA collection as narrowly as you’d like – you’ll want to be sure that the PDA collection you make available only contains titles you are happy to have purchased should they encounter sufficient usage.
We provide you with the MARC records for all the titles you decide to put in your active PDA collections so that those titles can be discoverable through your catalog.
Note, before your PDA account can be activated, you will need to allocate PDA funds by contacting your sales rep or customer_service@proquest.com.
To be alerted if your PDA funds run low you must configure the alerts, see:
http://support.ebrary.com/kb/low-funds-alert/
Loans refer to short-term loans of ebrary titles. Loans work much like PDA except that “sufficient usage” of a title in an active Loan or PDA+Loan collection causes it to be loaned first, not purchased. Features of Loans:
- A loaned title is available as single-user for the duration of the loan period – the title can be used by different patrons during the loan period, but just one patron at a time.
- A loaned title cannot be full-document downloaded, but a page range or chapter (page limitations apply) can be downloaded as an image PDF.
- A profile can be set up for 1-day or 1-week loans (typically at a per-loan price of 10%, 15% of purchase price), and for a max of 1, 2, or 3 loans.
- The cost of the loans are not deducted from the purchase price if the title is purchased.
- If the profile is set up as PDA+Loan, then after the max number of loans have been exhaused, additional sufficient use will cause the title to be purchased.
- If the profile is set up as just Loan, then after the max number of loans, the title will be removed from future loan consideration.
- The email address(es) listed in the profile AND in the fund code assigned to the profile (if there is one) will be notified by email on a daily basis of all loans initiated (if there are new loans to report). The admin can at that point choose whether to:
a. Make no changes regarding a loaned title
b. Purchase a title outright (thereby preempting the cost of future loans)
c. Remove it from the profile’s active collection (thereby making it no longer available for loans or PDA purchase)
- Loans are not available for Corporate or Government sites due to publisher restrictions
Any of the following usage will trigger a PDA title for either purchase or loan:
- 10 pages viewed in a single browser session (other than front or back matter*), or
- 10 minutes of viewing in a single browser session (other than front or back matter*), or
- 1 print of any page, or
- 1 copy from any page, or
- 1 download of either type and of any page (note, a title on loan cannot be full-document downloaded)
*Front matter and back matter are defined as the first 5% and the last 5% of a document’s pages.
Each PDA profile has two parts:
- A set of search criteria
- A collection of titles
The typical approach to setting up a PDA profile is:
- Set up the search criteria
- Run the search
- Add all the titles returned by the search to the collection
- Make that collection of titles active and available for your patrons to use
The search criteria and the collection are in some ways separate and distinct:
- If you want to add a title to your collection even though it doesn’t meet your search criteria, you can manually add it to your collection. (So note, you can end up with titles in your collection that don’t match your search criteria).
- If you make your search criteria LESS restrictive, and then run your search, what you have is a set of titles being recommended to add to your collection. But… they aren’t automatically added to your collection. You have to select the titles you want to add from that list (perhaps use “Select All”), then add them to your collection. Once they are added to your collection (and the collection is active) they are available to your patrons.
- If you make your search MORE restrictive – such as reducing the list price to be 1-200 instead of 1-400, then when you re-run the search probably no new titles would come up (because the search is more restrictive). At that point your search criteria is set, but… it does NOT automatically remove titles in your collection that don’t meet the new restrictions. Instead, you have to go into your collection and manually remove those titles. So in this example, you would need to go to your profile collection, search for all titles with a list price 201-400 and remove all those titles.
The key to understanding PDA is recognizing that the search criteria and the collection are separate. The search criteria can be used to add titles to the collection, but not to take titles out of the collection. And the collection can be modified directly by either adding or removing titles – regardless of whether they match your search criteria.
If you change a profile’s search criteria and you want the titles in that profile’s collection to be limited to only the titles that match the new search criteria, you will need to delete all titles currently in the profile’s collection, then re-run the profile’s search criteria and add the matches to the profile’s collection.
To delete all titles currently in the profile’s collection:
- Go to the PROFILE tab
- Click “View Collection” for the profile
- Click “Select All“
- Click “Remove Selection from Profile“
To re-run the profile’s search criteria and add the matches to the profile’s collection:
- Go to the PROFILE tab, click “Run Search” for the profile
- From the list of new matches, click “Select All“ or select only the title(s) you want to add to the collection
- Click the “+ Add to …” button (top left) to add the selected titles to the profile’s collection
You can then go to the PROFILE tab and click View Collection to see that the selected titles have been added to the collection.
1. Go to your ebrary site and sign in to your ebrary account
2. Click the Admin tab, then ACQUISITION tab
3. Click-to-select Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA)
4. OPTION A to limit by SUBJECT then PUBLISHER:
- Click Find by Subject
- Click to select the subject(s) to include (click + to narrow a subject further)
Due to system limitations, avoid selecting all and then deselecting a few -
It will result in the error message “Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any documents that match your search criteria. Please try again.”
- Click Show Publishers
Due to system limitations, avoid selecting all and then deselecting a few -
It will result in the error message “Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any documents that match your search criteria. Please try again.”
- Click to select the publisher(s) to include, or click “Select All Publishers” then click to remove specific publishers
- OPTION 1 if your search criteria is complete, click Show Documents
- OPTION 2 to narrow with additional search criteria, click Filter, enter search criteria, click Filter
… OPTION B to limit using the usual ADVANCED SEARCH features:
- Click Advanced Search
- It should come up with the PDA eligible collection already selected
- Enter search criteria
- Click Search ebrary
5. At this point, you will have a collection of titles that have met all your search criteria. Select only the titles in this list that you want to make available in your PDA collection (or click Select All).
6. Click Create PDA profile
7. Follow the prompts to name your profile, fill in your email, etc.
- Be sure the PDA box is checked.
- If you’re using fund codes, assign one.
- You can choose the option of “Loans before purchase” to make this a PDA+Loan profile (except Loans are not available for Corporate or Government sites due to publisher restrictions):
- If a title is Loan-eligible, triggerable use will cause it to be loaned; after max loans, triggerable use will cause it to be purchased
- If a title is not Loan-eligible, triggerable use will cause it to be purchased right off
- The email address(es) listed here will be notified for the following:
- When the profile’s search criteria is auto-rerun, if new results matching the search criteria are found
- When a loan is initiated, a notification email is sent
- In the email, the recipient is given the option of purchasing the loaned title without further loans, removing it from the PDA discoverable list, or making no change
- This email will also be sent to the email address(es) listed in the fund code if one is assigned to the profile
8. Click Create. For alert that non-PDA-eligible titles will be removed, click OK.
That’s it. Your profile will have then been created! It has a search criteria and a collection. You can take a closer look at your collection (and narrow it further) by clicking the “View Collection” link in the PROFILE tab. Your profile collection should only include titles you want your patrons to access and potentially trigger for purchase.
After completing the above steps, the titles in your PDA collection will be active on your ebrary site once:
- ebrary’s Order Fulfillment team has designated funds to your PDA account
(check this under the LOAN/PDA tab)
- The profile’s associated fund code (if you assigned one) is enabled
(check this under the FUND CODE tab)
And at that point you will also have access to the ebrary MARC records for all the titles in your collection.