2013 Charleston Conference

Patron-driven acquisition (PDA) or Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) has been around for some time now and many large academic libraries have already adopted it. However, not many community colleges have taken a shot at allowing their patrons to do the selection. Since collection development in community college libraries is driven by curricular needs of its students and teaching support for their faculty, titles included in the PDA/DDA pool differ from larger four-year undergraduate libraries. Likewise, usage of titles in the PDA/DDA pool also presents surprising insights into what our patrons are “selecting.” If you think that PDA can’t be done if you don’t have a big budget, then let us prove you wrong.

This presentation will look at Lansing Community College and Gulf Coast State College experience with DDA/PDA, using Ebrary as the vendor and YBP and Coutts as service providers. This session will look into the titles selected by our patrons, including usage, cost, subjects, and publisher data analysis. We will also share budget and financial data that can help community colleges or even a small four-year college gain confidence in trying out a PDA program even on a tight budget. We will also discuss some caveats, lessons learned, and future collection development implications in light of our experience in allowing our patrons do the selection.

Those who attend this session will learn how to implement a PDA program on a very small budget, roadblocks we hit as smaller institutions, and how to analyze the choices students made and tie it up to the overall collection management decisions moving forward.