Unraveling Hypertext_ Analyzing Postmodern Elements in Literature.pptx
AAUP 2012: PDA and Libraries (R. Anderson)
1. Everything You Wanted to
Know about PDA…
… from the Library Perspective
Rick Anderson
Associate Director
Scholarly Resources & Collections
2. Two Broad Categories of “Collection”
Unique/Curatorial (Special Collections)
Orientation: Global
General/Functional (Circulating Collections)
Orientation: Local
J. Willard Marriott Library
3. How Do We Build Collections?
Guessing what patrons will want
Buying documents based on those guesses
Describing the documents (proxy docs)
Organizing them
J. Willard Marriott Library
4. Alternatives
Share. (Ugh.)
PDA - Books: expose [everything we can] and buy only
when the patron points
Ebooks (MyiLibrary, NetLibrary, EBL, Ebrary, etc.)
Print books (LightningSource, OUP, etc.)
Print books (Espresso Book Machine)
PDA – Journals: article-based purchasing
Remember: patrons don’t need journals; they need articles
This is the opposite of the Big Deal: it’s the Tiny Deal
Problem: publishers don’t want to sell that way
J. Willard Marriott Library
5. Problems
Budget management
What if they select garbage?
“What about my job?”
J. Willard Marriott Library
6. U of U – Philosophical Context
2. Access to the river, not the pond
4. Access to
whatever/wherever/whenever/however the
patron wants
J. Willard Marriott Library
7. U of U – Experimental History
30% cut to materials budget in FY09
Adopted e-first/patron-first guidelines
PDA experiments:
MyiLibrary
Ebrary
EBL
NetLibrary
YBP (with EBL)
J. Willard Marriott Library
8. U of U – Experimental History
E-first
$640,000 on ebooks in FY2011
Patron-first
$299,000 on PDA in FY2011
Print-on-demand
Espresso Book Machine
J. Willard Marriott Library
9. Outsourcing Selection
Demand-Driven Acquisition via YBP/EBL
Records for notification forms loaded into
catalog
Patron use triggers 24-hour “loan” at 10% of
list price; third use triggers purchase at list
Selection teams continue to receive
notifications
J. Willard Marriott Library
10. Problems
Too many vendors/platforms/models
Too few front-list titles available as ebooks
Too little money for true, comprehensive PDA
EspressNet metadata = crap
Odd materials still require in-house
processing of various kinds
J. Willard Marriott Library
11. Future of Acquisitions at U of U
Less of it mediated by librarians and based
on librarians’ speculation
More of it occurring “just in time”
Less of it involving physical objects (river vs.
pond)
More granular; less package-y*
* if we can get the prices right
J. Willard Marriott Library
PLEASE NOTE: I ’ll be speaking from the perspective of an academic library, and not everything I say will apply as well to public libraries.
Both are “research” collections, but while there will always be some degree of overlap in the communities that use them and in the purposes for which they’re used, each of them still serves a primary community and a primary type of use. So, for example: at UU we have a unique collection of Mormon pioneer diaries. A freshman doing a ten-page research paper on the Westward expansion may go to the trouble of consulting those documents in the Special Collections reading room, but is probably going to make more use of the general/functional collection. A professor from Minnesota who visits our library while researching a monograph on the westward expansion is more likely to spend more time with those documents, rather than with the non-unique university press books in our general collection (many of which will duplicate holdings in her home library). My comments today are going to focus on the general/functional collection, and from now on whenever I say “collection” you can assume that that’s what I mean.
This was obviously the right process during the print era, when the vast majority of documents were tied up in physical formats. The only good way to meet a patron ’s information needs was to have the relevant physical document waiting for him in the library when he showed up. The problem, of course, is that we no longer live in the print era. So we need to ask ourselves whether, in the digital era, it still makes sense to assume that preemptive, speculative purchasing is the right way to give patrons access to documents? And given that we ’re in the midst of an explosion of just-in-time delivery options, this begs a much larger question: should the library continue building collections at all?
