Customer-Based Collection Development: An Overview

Citation

Rhiannon Gainor (2015), "Customer-Based Collection Development: An Overview", Library Review, Vol. 64 No. 4/5, pp. 394-395. https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-01-2015-0004

Academic librarians and professors of library and information science from a variety of institutions have been brought together in this slim volume to exhaustively review the issues and implications of patron-driven acquisitions for academic libraries, specifically focusing on e-book purchases. Through helpfully transparent case studies and critical analysis, the authors provide a robust multi-faceted view of this approach to collection development, including arguments for the positive elements (e.g. perceived cost-effectiveness) and the negative elements (e.g. questions around materials retention).

The book is well edited and the content thoughtfully constructed. Aspects of patron-driven acquisitions reviewed in the book include: selecting an e-book vendor; specific details around budgeting and running a pilot program; the technical requirements of e-book provision; training staff; practices in usage analysis; quality control in cataloguing; and the longer-term implications for library collections and services.

Because some chapters regrettably lapse into the “alphabet soup” of heavy acronym use and assume prior knowledge on the part of the reader, with negative implications for comprehension, this book is not recommended to those who are not already somewhat familiar with library management and collections development practices. For those who are interested in either establishing or increasing their patron-driven acquisitions programmes in academic or public libraries, this book is highly recommended. Although the examples given are solely of academic libraries, many of the issues discussed will be relevant to any library seeking to establish patron-driven collection practices for e-book purchasing.

This book is also recommended to scholars of collections development and library services, including students taking collections development courses. Professors teaching library and information science graduate students in such courses are particularly recommended to read the chapter written by John Buschman as a potential teaching tool. That chapter provides a compelling and well-written summary of the arguments for patron-driven acquisitions and the research advocating for e-book purchasing, with some scepticism.

Some sections and chapters of this book (notably the final two chapters) go beyond factual descriptions of practice and the how-to of implementation into a deeper and more thoughtful analysis of library service provision in relation to collection development. The authors of the book, in many instances, have made efforts to describe the history of patron-driven acquisitions, explore the tension between user requests and subject expertise and debate the implications of e-book provision to patrons in a thought-provoking way. It is well worth reading.