2013 Charleston Conference

In November 2012, a small task force was created to start working on a PDA pilot. We knew that we wanted to do a PDA pilot in the spring through our book provider, YPB, and that we wanted to take the rather unusual step of working with two e-book platforms, Ebrary and EBL. We were working with a limited budget and, based on the literature about other libraries’ experiences with this purchasing model, we were very cautious about how many records we loaded. The pilot was launched in March 2013 and at the end of the fiscal year we found ourselves with a successful implementation of PDA that came in under budget, and that we could continue into the new fiscal year despite the overall collections budget being much tighter for FY2014. In this poster, we will describe the parameters we used for ensuring a slow but steady stream of records into our system, the challenges of working with two e-book platforms, our timeline from discussion to implementation and how much traffic the loaded records received. Attendees can expect to learn how to they can experiment with PDA even within the constraints of a more limited budget.