Patron-Driven Purchase on Demand Programs for Printed Books and Similar Materials: A Chronological Review and Summary of Findings, David C. Tyler

Among academic librarians, collection development has long been considered a vital duty, if not something of a nigh-sacred trust and exercise of librarians' authority and judgment.1 Over the decades, selecting librarians have done their level best, by identifying the best materials and by being familiar with the faculty and students that they served, to build useful and coherent collections that would both fulfill current users' needs and anticipate the needs of future patrons (Stowell Bracke, Hérubel, & Ward 2010; Hodges, Preston, & Hamilton 2010). This collection-building model, often called the "Just-in-Case" model, unfortunately has had a number of shortcomings. The first and foremost may be economic, as "price inflation for print and electronic products, the increase in the production of scholarly material, and the increased cost of storing materials that might never circulate" (Hodges et al. 2010) has rendered anything approaching comprehensive collection building no longer feasible. This last point is especially germane as, since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, academic librarians have had repeatedly to acknowledge the difficulty inherent in predicting, via the mechanism of acquisition, which books patrons will want to borrow (Davidson 1943; Fussler & Simon 1969; Trueswell 1969; Bulick, Sabor, & Flynn 1979; Hardesty 1981; Burrell 1985; Britten 1990; Fenske 1994; Eldredge 1998; Blecic 2000). Librarians have both bemoaned the funds wasted on idle books and come to favor interlibrary loan (henceforth, ILL) as the means to overcome collections' shortcomings.