[Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDA

[Smith, Kelly]

Although we heavily rely here on DDA, we also still purchase print, but with extreme budget cuts we can no longer afford allocating large sums to the "just in case" method. Just can't do it or justify it; there are too many other priorities fighting their way to the top of the budget.

Yes, this is where demand driven models have become a necessity for some of us. Of course librarians can pick valuable books, but valuable for whom and at what point in time? My library cannot afford to buy every monograph that is good. So, we let patron need drive our purchasing. We don't buy every single thing a patron requests (if a patron requests a clinical nursing book from 1975, we borrow it) but if it fits the criteria that we have developed, we buy it, whether it is in print or electronic (those of us with online programs have got to favor electronic for those subjects, despite the fact that many people prefer reading in print).

One area in which we do actively select books is for curated displays to help spur serendipitous discovery. For example, our campus is exploring Metacognition as a strategy for improving learning outcomes across the curriculum. We're developing a display for the "staff picks" area of our reading room that will highlight metacognition. We didn't necessarily have an extensive collection on this one topic, so we'll buy some newer things to flesh it out. And we'll promote eBooks and other online content related to this in our social media. I think this curatorial role will only expand in the future.


Kelly Smith
Coordinator of Collections and Discovery
Eastern Kentucky University Libraries
email kelly.smith2 at eku.edu<mailto:kelly.smith2 at eku.edu> | research guides<http://libguides.eku.edu/prf.php?account_id=300>


From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Rick Anderson
Sent: Friday, September 25, 2015 12:59 PM
To: Karen Jensen <kljensen at alaska.edu>
Cc: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] funding for DDA/PDA

Although we heavily rely here on DDA, we also still purchase print, but with extreme budget cuts we can no longer afford allocating large sums to the "just in case" method. Just can't do it or justify it; there are too many other priorities fighting their way to the top of the budget.

This is indeed a really, really difficult dimension of the issue. The question about print books isn't just whether they're valuable, but how their value stacks up against that of the other valuable things we have to buy.

And of course that's also the question about ebooks, databases, print journals, ejournals, A/V materials, etc. Our job isn't only to identify and purchase things that are valuable-that's the fun and relatively easy part-but also to choose between multiple valuable things when we can't afford all of them. That's the difficult and frustrating part.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
rick.anderson at utah.edu<mailto:rick.anderson at utah.edu>


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