1. Josh Petrusa
Assoc. Dean for Technical Services
Butler University
ILF, Noblesville, IN
August 7, 2012
2.
3. What‘s that got to do
with…?
Patron-Driven Acquisition (PDA):
“any system whereby documents are
acquired by the library in response to
patrons' direct requests or selections,
rather than in response to librarians'
speculations about which specific
documents patrons are going to need”
Rick Anderson, University of Utah
http://www.alaeditions.org/blog/181/patron-driven-acquisition-rick-
anderson-answers-your-questions
4.
5. Why is this important?
Relevancy
Patron demands
Limits of traditional collection
development
What is the purpose of our collection?
6. Is it new?
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/1991588954/
7. ―While most librarians seriously
considered users‘ requests for
specific titles… in general librarians
selected the vast majority of titles. To
borrow a term from industry, librarians
historically built collections on the ‗just
in case‘ inventory model.
Nixon, Judith, Robert Freeman, and Suzanne Ward . "Patron-Driven
Acquisitions: An Introduction and Literature Review." Collection
Management. 35. (2010): 119-124.
8. ―Is Selection Dead? The Rise of
Collection Management and the
Twilight of Selection,‖
ALCTS/Collection Management &
Development Section (CMDS) at ALA‘s
2011 Midwinter Conference
9. Anderson on Collections
―Recently and quite suddenly, this fundamental
reality of the information world has
changed. Now, the documents that our
patrons need are very frequently available in
digital formats that make them easy to find and
make near-instantaneous acquisition of them
possible for the first time in human history... At
the same time, library acquisition budgets are
under unprecedented pressure. These two
facts should lead us to rethink our traditional
collection-building practices at a pretty radical
level.‖
http://www.against-the-grain.com/2011/05/v-23-2-is-selection-dead-the-rise-of-
collection-management-and-the-twilight-of-selection/
12. "Patron-Driven Acquisition: Radically
Rethinking the Collection― – ALA
Editions
http://www.alaeditions.org/blog/180/contin
uing-conversation-patron-driven-
acquisition-radically-re-thinking-
collection-session-
http://www.alaeditions.org/blog/181/patro
n-driven-acquisition-rick-anderson-
answers-your-questions
http://www.alaeditions.org/blog/176/patro
n-driven-acquisitions-readings
Image by hindsl at www.flickr.com/photos/55688631@N03/5375140845/
13. ―Patron-Driven Acquisition and the
Educational Mission of the Academic
Library‖
―Failure to distinguish between students‘
immediate desires and their long-term educational
needs
Failure to make full use of librarians‘ knowledge
and expertise
Failure to represent the full range of library
stakeholders, such as future students and faculty
Systematic and idiosyncratic biases in selection
Potential overspending and associated budgetary
problems
Cataloging issues that may impede information
discovery‖
Walters, W.H. Library Resources & Technical Services 56(3) 2012, 199-213
15. How can PDA work?
Where do patrons discover items?
Are available items pre-selected/screened?
Are the purchase requests mediated?
Are items rented or purchased? Can the user
tell the difference
How will payment/fund accounting work for the
user and the library?
What can the user do with purchased items?
What does this mean for
ownership/preservation?
16. Case study: Norwich Univ.
Previous institution
Private military college
Online Graduate
programs
Also moving into web-
scale discovery,
management systems
Budget issues
http://norwich.typepad.com/wickpics/2011/02/a-
absorbed by book line beautiful-day-for-a-hike-on-paine-mountain.html
17. Ebook Library (EBL)
www.eblib.com
Good selection of academic content
Short –term loans (rental option)
Downloading available
Mediated vs Non-Mediated option
MARC in OCLC; decent interface
Usage terms for ownership titles
Integration with Ezproxy for
authentication
18. Discovery - How will patrons
find?
Local MARC or direct to vendor
interface?
LOTS of data
OCLC WMS in 2011
19. Pre-selection?
Available in
EBL‘s admin
Pre-selection
also now
happening via
OCLC WMS
admin
(Ebrary‘s PDA
admin shown)
21. Mediation
Mediation – do requests need to be
approved?
Time/price negotiation
Email?
Direct Purchase?
Norwich has moved to an automatic 7
day loan when one is requested
22. The money stuff
Short term loans/rentals – cost savings
of % from full price purchase
Move to purchase on the fourth 7 day
loan of an item (less than 2% of activity)
Originally intended for online students,
on-campus use has increased, now 50-
50 with distance
Expect to spend $25,000 this year,
funding from various budget lines
23. Guide created by Heidi Steiner, Distance Learning Librarian, Norwich University
24.
25.
26. Success at Norwich?
Increased on-campus use
Increase in total usage
Complement to declining book budget
Students silently happy?
27. Ebrary‘s 2011 Global Student
Ebook survey, compared with
‗08
Key findings of the survey of more than 6,500
students include the following:
• E-book usage and awareness have not
increased significantly in 2011 over 2008
• Preference for printed books over electronic
books has not changed: Both are still equally
important
• The vast majority of students would choose
electronic over print if it were available and if
better tools along with fewer restrictions were
offered
http://www.ebrary.com/corp/newspdf/ebrary_2011_Student_Survey.pdf
28. ―Tools and Restrictions‖
DRM – Adobe? Epub?
Downloading available for MY device?
Publishers in the way?
Ebrary announces downloading; Wayne
Bivens-Tatum blogs the 18 Easy Steps
(at http://bit.ly/tpeHHr)
About those devices…
32. “If it were available”
Ebooks available as PDA have changed
the game.
We will still pre-select and buy print
books (just in case & preservation)
Library no longer the only place to
discover information
Patrons are connected to data without
us; we need to insert the library into their
workflow
43. Usage Study – Quality?
Does PDA allow unwanted content?
Ebook Library (EBL) PDA at 5 schools
PDA titles used twice as often as
librarian selected ebooks
PDA ebooks saw more users per title
than pre-selected ebooks
PDA collection had fewer ―no use‖ titles
than pre-selected
J. McDonald and J. Price, ―Beguiled by Bananas‖, Charleston
Conference 2009 http://bit.ly/u04u9y
44. Getting It System Toolkit
(GIST)
Developed at SUNY Geneseo
Add-on for ILLiad
Enables user requests to become loans or
purchases
Improved patron interface
Integrations with WorldCat API, Google Books,
HathiTrust
http://gettingitsystemtoolkit.wordpress.com/about/
49. DRMinator
―Ultimately, we know what our users want in ebooks:
the same freedom they have with electronic
journals. Most publisher platforms provide this
freedom—aggregator platforms don‘t. The question
at hand then is: should libraries be forced to choose
between broad, sophisticated, effective patron
driven acquisition systems uniquely provided by
aggregators and DRM-free ebooks uniquely provided
by publishers‖
Price, J.S. (2011) Patron driven acquisition of publisher-hosted content:
Bypassing DRM. Against the Grain 23(3):16-18
50. More from Anderson
―The purpose of a collection is not to be a
wonderful collection; the purpose of a
collection is to meet the information needs
of library users. If it is now possible to
meet those needs by means other than
traditional collection-building (perhaps by
means of patron-driven, just-in-time
acquisition), and if budget cuts increase the
opportunity cost of every dollar spent on a
book, then don‘t we have a professional
duty to explore those other means? ‖
http://www.against-the-grain.com/2011/05/v-23-2-is-selection-dead-the-rise-of-
collection-management-and-the-twilight-of-selection/
51. What‘s stopping us?
Traditional collection philosophy
Catalogs/systems that don‘t support
information about non-owned items
Reluctance to support multiple
unfamiliar devices we don‘t own
