Collection Development

There are a few things that came up recently, which got me thinking about technical services' relationships with public services. First, I was reading Lihong Zhu “The Role of Paraprofessionals in Technical Services in Academic Libraries” (Library Resources & Technical Services, v. 56 no. 3, July 2012), which addresses the expanding responsibilities of paraprofessional staff and acknowledges that today's technical services paraprofessionals perform duties that for decades were the exclusive role of full-fledged librarians. Subsequent conversations with my staff about approval plans, budgeting and standing orders have blurred the demarcations in our library between technical services staff and public services staff in the area of collection development. Finally, we're developing a subcommittee of our Collections Steering Committee to review the shared acquisitions workflows between subject librarians and our department, Monographic Services.

At least seven years ago, I remember one full-service library book vendor encouraging libraries to not to fear e-books and announcing that their goal was to make e-book purchasing work like print book purchasing: they aimed to integrate the processes of e-book provision with their already well-established print book sales methods. Since that time, e-books have been well integrated into the same purchasing processes libraries use for print books: approval plans, firm orders and standing orders work well title-by-title. However, e-books give publishers other sales workstreams and pricing models that go outside the routines that have been in place for print books. This is the first of two posts looking at some challenges for book vendors in selling e-books to libraries.

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

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.

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?

“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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