The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
Patron-driven acquisition (also known as demand-driven acquisition) enables libraries to have many more ebooks discoverable, without the need to purchase them up front. The user triggers a purchase after selecting and browsing a title (the algorithm may trigger a purchase directly after a certain time spent with the title, or on page turns. Alternatively it may send a request through to a librarian to mediate the purchase).
I am curious as to the impact of PDA on the library's budget. I have heard a number of stories where ebook budgets were spent extremely quickly (in the first few weeks of term). What mitigating procedures have libraries put in place, and has the use of PDA generally been a success in your institution?
Ben
While I don't personally deal with Patron-Driven Acquisition, the consortium I belong to uses it for the digital collection they manage with Overdrive. Due to the high number of patron holds and budget constraints, they have to have a higher triggering number than they, the libraries, or the patrons would like. So while I've heard of places that have a trigger at 3+ holds to purchase, my consortium has a 9+ holds trigger and the item is merely placed in a list for suggested purchase. The purchase does not go through automatically, someone must review the list, make sure it doesn't push the budget, and then okay the purchases.
When setting up a patron-driven acquisition system, especially initially, it seems valuable to have those sorts of safeguards in place, either higher trigger limits or some sort of mediation.
Our organisation uses Patron Drive Acquisition to prioritise our very limited budget, but we do have controls set out like the above. I.e. a certain level of demand must be met before a purchase made. Library staff also review all suggested purchases so that they can spot trends, and adjust the 'trigger level' if we know that demand is going to increase due to an upcoming movie release or a literary award.
The budget does expended earlier in the financial year, rather than later, but it also provides a great justification for what we buy and there are no end of financial year hassles with our accounts department (given that the majority is spent by the mid-year mark).
It is going to vary sharply depending how a library opts to set it up - every ebook vendor has different criteria for what triggers a purchase, but in a library may also opt for "lending" agreements instead (in my opinion, this is a poor way to go, since money spent towards lending /short term loans does not go towards the purchase price of the book later, if purchased).
And how much control does the library decide to have on the records that are chosen for ebook purchasing - which can also vary greatly, from the library buying into package deals to librarians vetting all records beforehand? I suspect if we just said to a vendor "hey, load the nyt best seller list into our catalog," our budget would be blow pretty quickly.* But since we instead opted to hand select records to fill in an area that we are lacking a subject specialist in, we are seeing some use - about comparable to what we would expect to see in paper circulation.
*We don't collect NYT best sellers as a general rule.
Most of the horror stories I heard were from the early days, before libraries and vendors had worked out most of the kinks. Triggers are not as trigger-happy, and libraries are smarter about profiling the kinds of books they want in the program.
For example, my library has been participating in a PDA program since January, and we've had less than ten triggered purchases during that time, in part because the selection pool is quite focused. We went for social science & humanities titles that fit our slip profile, and by default that also narrowed down to ebooks available on the specific platform we chose. Essentially, these are titles we might choose to purchase on our own, but rather than risk picking ones that no one wants, we let the users decide. What we didn't do is throw anything and everything into the pool.