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:
- the
initial set-up, basically a PDA opening day collection that would populate
the catalog with two years of back-list content; and
- 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.
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