Patron Driven Acquisition: A Model for Providing Complete Access to Electronic Content While Limiting Costs For Libraries

Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) is a hot topic in today’s library world. Driven by stagnant or dwindling library budgets, libraries – at first in the US, and now internationally – have been exploring new ways to offer their patrons – i.e. library users – access to the broadest range of high-quality content for research and teaching. Taking advantage of the increasing availability of academic content in digital form, a number of retailers over the last few years have been developing increasingly popular models for Patron Driven Acquisition.1 These models permit libraries to purchase e-books only when library users have requested them with a given frequency. Usually, the budget for this type of acquisition is set in advance so as to give the institutions some control over their costs. To date, no single PDA service model offered by an individual publisher has been adopted on a broad scale. While the potential economic advantages of PDA is beyond question, systemic problems have arisen in utilizing the model. Critics of Patron Driven Acquisition argue that the model only favors the transitory information interests of individual users and fails to provide adequate support for the deliberate growth of a library’s digital holdings. Indeed, libraries still consider building their collections to be a part of their core mission in the digital world, as is the case for printed books.