As part of GW Libraries acquisitions plan, we receive e-books through a Demand Driven Acquisitions (DDA) plan. The subject librarians work with our vendor to set up subject areas, publishers, and research levels of books that GW would like to receive. As books that match those areas become available in e-book form via the Demand Driven program on the ProQuest EBook Central Platform, records are added to our catalog.
When students or faculty members find these books in the catalog, they click on the link and in most cases are taken seamlessly to the e-book. In some cases, where the cost is higher, (generally over $200/book) there may be a slight delay as the request is forwarded to a librarian for confirmation and approval.
The key benefit of this program is that GW Libraries is not charged for books until they are used, thus enabling us to make more books available than if we had to purchase them all up front whether or not they are used.
This plan adds about 1000 titles per month to the catalog, with new titles added each week. In the first year of the program (2015-2016), these titles were used about 7300 times. Major publishers represented include Wiley, Springer, Elsevier, CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, and Brill.
In addition to the DDA program, GW Libraries receives e-books through many other packages, such as the JSTOR EBook package, books on Oxford Scholarship Online, books within Access Engineering, etc. For a more complete listing of our e-book collections, see our e-book Research Guide.
Students and faculty may suggest books for purchase via our Book and Media Request form. Feel free to reach out to your Collection Development Librarian or Concierge Team if you have further questions!
