Collection Development

Convenience vs. Collections: The Netflix Case

In my family, we have had a Netflix membership since 2005 and it was the best thing since sliced bread.

Evolution of Gifts-in-Kind, Part 1: The OP Market

This is the first of two posts on changes in gifts-in-kind in libraries. This week I discuss the out-of-print market and rise of Internet technology, and the impact on library donations as a collection development tool. In two weeks I will describe how our library has adjusted to these changes and realigned gifts-in-kind with its mission.

Abundance, Scarcity and Deliberate Efficiency

As academic libraries continue in 21st century collection development, librarians face competing questions of abundant information resources and scarce infrastructure internally and have opportunities to collaborate externally to alleviate some of these problems. In this context, how important are general circulating print collections to each individual institution, when so much information is digital? Will the character of the 21st century academic library ultimately be defined by its special collections of unique resources? Will the library’s importance be gauged by what it alone can provide?

PDA and the Scholarly Record at Charleston

“Patron-driven acquisitions” (PDA) was a hot topic at the XXX Annual Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition. Basically, with PDA, a library agrees to let a vendor populate its ILS with bibliographic records for e-books, based on some agreed-upon criteria. The library budgets a certain amount it will spend to buy some of these e-books. Patrons have immediate access to these e-books, whether or not the library has purchased them. When a given e-book is “used” (I think the criteria for “used” vary somewhat from agreement to agreement) a certain number of times (I’ve heard three-to-ten), the library automatically purchases the book for the collections.

Much of the talk at Charleston was about how to make this work for your library. There was a testimonial about how much money was “saved,” but the savings were based on the condition: if the library had bought—and bought only—every e-book a patron accessed in the collection.

The arguments for PDA include spending less time spent selecting titles with no guarantee of a given title’s usefulness and speeding up patrons’ access to information they want. For these reasons and others, it’s difficult to argue against PDA from a service perspective.

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