Abstract
[Excerpt] At the 2014 Charleston Conference, we held the first Charleston Seminar. The theme was “Being Earnest with our Collections: Determining Key Challenges and Best Practices.” As part of that program, the two of us, both librarians responsible for collection development at small liberal arts college libraries, spoke about a challenge in the scholarly communication landscape. Our objective is the ability to seamlessly acquire pre-selected serial content at the point of need, with an option for long-term “ownership” — in other words, to add demand-driven acquisition as an option for serial content at the article level, thereby adding that content to our library collections. Of course, with digital content remotely hosted, ownership is perception. The reality is that we license e-content by paying for ongoing access (more like a long-term lease, perhaps, but often with a one-time price, as with eBook purchases), while perceptions of access vs. ownership affect pricing models. This article presents our argument in favor of DDA for serial content, and also reports the results of related surveys we conducted following the seminar.