This document discusses patron-driven acquisition (PDA) of ebooks. It provides background on PDA from Rick Anderson's definition. Key benefits of PDA mentioned include increased relevancy for patrons, responsiveness to patron demands, and addressing limits of traditional collection development. The document then examines examples of PDA programs at various libraries and considerations for implementing PDA, such as discovery tools, pre-selection of content, mediation of purchase requests, purchase vs. rental models, and how payments are handled. Challenges of PDA including impact on the educational mission, biases in selection, budget issues, and cataloging are also addressed.

1. Josh Petrusa
Assoc. Dean for Technical Services
Butler University
ILF, Noblesville, IN
August 7, 2012

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

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/

10. http://www.slideshare.net/CharlestonConference/let-them-eat-everything-by-rick-anderson-university-of-utah

11. http://www.slideshare.net/CharlestonConference/let-them-eat-everything-by-rick-anderson-university-of-utah

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

14. How do we reprogram
HAL?

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)

20. http://www.ebscohost.com/ebooks/patron-driven-acquisition

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

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…

29. Old Devices

30. New Devices

31. Access/Ownership

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

33. Discovery?

34. Full-text indexing?

35. Ebook Angst
http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/the-ebook-cargo-cult/

36. Ebook Angst…
http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2012/08/ebookssuckitude.html

37. Ebook Angst
http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2012/07/ebooks/ebooks-choices-and-the-soul-of-
librarianship/

38. Ebook Angst
http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/e-content/50-shades-red-losing-our-shirts-ebooks

39. Ebook Angst
http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2012/06/ebooks/all-hat-no-cattle-a-call-for-libraries-
to-transform-before-its-too-late/

40. http://douglascountylibraries.org/content/ebooks-and-DCL

41. Ebook
Angst
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2111396

42. Concern – imbalanced
collection?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stankuns/3229592156/

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/

45. http://www.slideshare.net/gettingitsystemtoolkit/gist-for-illiad-webpages

46. Overdrive?

47. Academic / Public differences
 Content availability – pre-selection?
 High-use/demand items (license levels)
 Digital divide/download issues
 Publishers and their, um… tactics
 Preservation questions – question of
mission?

48. http://www.geekhangover.com/news/2010/7/18/dmn-you-drm.html

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

52. Thank You
Josh Petrusa
jpetrusa@butler.edu
HAL 9000 in the library clip at
http://youtu.be/WG2xeJ2j5OE
Presentation at
http://slidesha.re/uZeQH4