Keeping up With...Patron Driven Acquisitions

Keeping Up With… is an online current awareness publication from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) featuring concise briefs on trends in academic librarianship and higher education. Each edition focuses on a single issue including an introduction to the topic and summaries of key points, including implications for academic libraries. © Copyright 1997-2014, American Library AssociationThis document may be reprinted and distributed for non-commercial and educational purposes only, and not for resale. No resale use may be made of material on this website at any time. All other rights reserved. || Historically, approaches to collection development in libraries relied on the subjective determination of librarians or outside vendors to select the material most suitable to address patron needs. Favoring broad strokes, acquisition policy relied on major publishers and sought to cover general subject areas. Several factors prompted a shift in approach to collection development, including reductions to staffing and budgets, but more importantly technological advancements and the proliferation of e-books caused the reevaluation of the resources patrons accessed and whether the collection accomplished its goal of satisfying their needs. The practice of patron driven acquisition (PDA) refines the broad strokes of acquisition to directly address the demands of patrons while managing costs by purchasing high use material, renting sparsely used titles and paying nothing for titles with no demand.

PDA involves the inclusion of bibliographic records to the catalog for titles the library does not own and permits the patron an opportunity to initiate a purchase. Beyond the practical implications of managing costs and liberating staff time, the PDA model provides patrons easier and quicker access to the widest range of information possible. The service model of populating a collection to protect against the possibility of patrons requiring access is increasingly unsustainable. Although not without its challenges, allowing the patron to provide a collaborative role with librarians in developing a collection serves to manage costs and streamlines the process of creating a collection which best addresses the needs of a constituency.