Patron-Driven Acquisitions : Current Successes and Future Directions

For over a decade, some academic libraries have been purchasing, rather than borrowing, recently published books requested by their patrons through interlibrary loan. These books had one circulation guaranteed and so appealed to librarians who were concerned about the large percentage of books selected and purchased by librarians but never checked out by their patrons. Early assessments of the projects indicated that patrons selected quality books that in many cases were cross disciplinary and covered emerging areas of scholarly interest. However, now we have a significant database of the ILL purchase records to compare these titles with books selected through normal methods. The projects described in this book present a powerful argument for involving patrons in the book selection process.

This book looks at patron-driven acquisitions for printed books at Purdue University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Illinois, as well as exploring new programs that allow patrons to select e-books or participate in other innovative ways in building the library collections.

This book was published as a special issue of Collection Management.

Judith M. Nixon is currently the College of Education Librarian and responsible for building the education collection. Past positions at Purdue have involved her in collection development efforts in subjects as varied as nutrition and management. Her interest in patron-driven acquisition comes from her focus on providing the best services to users.

Robert S. Freeman is Reference and Foreign Languages & Literatures Librarian for the Purdue University Libraries . He is responsible for collection development in several foreign languages and literatures, as well as linguistics, comparative literature, classical studies, Asian studies, and music. His research interests include library history and publishing history.

Suzanne M. Ward is Head, Collection Management for the Purdue University Libraries. In her former position at Purdue as Head, Access Services, she was an early implementer of the Interlibrary Loan book purchasing model and was active in the resource sharing arena. Her current interests include analyzing low use print material for potential de-selection.