Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Use And Cost Analysis Of E-Books: Patron-Driven Acquisitions Plan Vs. Librarian-Selected Titles, Suzanne M. Ward, Rebecca A. Richardson

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Many academic libraries have experimented with e-book patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) plans as small projects to test the concept of offering users thousands of titles, yet only paying for them as they are used. At the same time, many librarians continue traditional patterns of buying e-book titles the same way they bought print books for decades – purchasing titles based on their belief that these selections will be ones that local users need. This study shows that many librarian-selected e-book titles suffer the same fate as the traditional model of librarian-selected print books: many receive little or no use. The PDA …