2015 was not just a tough year for the mining sector in Canada. The drastic drop in the value of the Canadian dollar resulted in a fiscal crisis that left Western University Libraries with an unprecedented and unpredictable 25 percent decrease in purchasing power. With a large, successful DDA program to maintain, Western was faced with an economic crisis of their own.
The likelihood of a continued weak Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar led Western to determine that rolling with the fiscal times would be the only option. As a cornerstone of their acquisition strategy, the DDA would have to be revamped to ensure minimal impact on both stakeholders and the collection while working within the current fiscal realities.
This joint session shares the Western experience in working with ProQuest to develop a collection management plan that would transform a challenge into an opportunity by using a budget crisis to spur the creation of a replicable and repeatable DDA collection clean-up process. We will share the step-by-step project timeline, describe problems and outline how we worked together to develop solutions.
