How do you spell PDA!? Patron Driven Acquisitions Local to Consortium Print to E Pilots to Programs: There's a Model for Everyone!

Abstract

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library recently participated in two new “Just-in-Time” acquisitions programs, both of which employed Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA). The first study was jointly run with the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) and built on the success of CARLI’s robust resource sharing program. The purpose of this study was to begin to bridge the gap on title availability due to lack of purchase or the in-use status of high-demand materials. UIUC and CARLI worked with YBP to load 16,000 records into the CARLI I-Share union catalog, making these titles available to all the CARLI members’ libraries for easy requesting. This study focused on print books and resulted in the on-demand purchase of 190 books in five weeks; books were rush ordered and delivered to requestors (on average) within three business days. The second study was a local (UIUC) ebook pilot program that provided access to 6,000 ebooks and coincided with the launch of a mobile device web site to facilitate access to full text. Users accessed 677 titles (11% of available titles), prompting the purchase of 238 ebooks in approximately four months. In a time of great budget constraints and yet great expectations for access, libraries can experiment in multiple ways to continue to provide great service.