The P-D-A of It: Chicago Public Library's Patron-Driven Acquisitions Pilot, Part 1 estimated 5 pgs

Natalie Villegas 

INFO 266: Spring 2016

Medlar, M., Murphy, D. M., & Sposato, S. (2014, October). The P-D-A of It: Chicago Public Library's Patron-Driven Acquisitions Pilot, Part 1. Z687: Creating the Future of Technical Services. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/alcts/resources/z687/cplpda1#a1 

In Chicago Public Library’s quest to develop a more patron driven collection development process they examined several processes and vendor roles. One was the Demand Driven Acquisitions (DDA) which calls for the collection department to preload potential titles to focus rather than limit materials as there is a large selection of titles in publication to choose from. The Chicago public library felt by having titles preloaded would bring awareness to patrons who wouldn’t have thought to make recommendations or bring awareness to the possibilities available. The preselection process is done through Ingram, which provides collection development services for a fee. Ingram will create a list of potential titles based on the Chicago Public Library’s parameters; then the staff in the collection development team reviews it and deletes any titles that already exist in the collection.  After this process the new titles are then incorporated in to the open catalog to be discovered.

The way in which the Chicago Public Library developed the parameters in which Ingram used for the selection process was quite efficient and established good guidelines for what would be desired by the community. The first step for the public library was to pull two years’ worth of inter library loan requests to review for patterns in publishers and subjects. Instead of selecting individual titles, the Chicago Public Library would preload full lists from trusted publishers; this was not only done for efficiency sake, but to guarantee that niche-interest titles would not be overlooked.

As noted in the article, the selections were divided into two parts:

1. the initial set-up, basically a PDA opening day collection that would populate the catalog with two years of back-list content; and
2. the ongoing titles, which would be what we would update the catalog with on a monthly basis moving ahead through the life of the project.

It is interesting to note they melded the current collection development and public driven acquisition processes together by having a delay in the monthly upload of titles; meaning there was an established 5 month lag. For example the titles uploaded in May would have been those titles selected in January, in order to provide time for the normal collection development to take place. Its interesting to note they still highlight the need for human involvement in the selection process before the list is incorporated. Chicago Public Library notes that occasionally books that technically meet the parameters will still need to be cut because they don’t meet the collection guidelines. The examples used in the writing include gift edition sets, and those materials selected at a higher scholarly level then that selected for their community. This also led to some publishers being dropped, such as Yale, Princeton, and Oxford publishing.

Since the projects initiation (fall 2013) the library has seen some “5,611 title added to the catalog based on the established parameters; 934 (16%) have been selected for purchase costing approximately $19,120”. The topics have consisted of computer programming, general technology, business, spiritual and religious nonfiction, an self-help titles. Of the 77 locations in the public library system, patrons from 74 locations have participated in the pilot program.