How can an academic library most effectively participate and expand their contributions to program reviews at the institutional level? By becoming involved in undergraduate reviews, college and university libraries can articulate new and enhanced roles for themselves on campus. Academic libraries have always contributed to a variety of institutional review processes. However, by embracing a more holistic view of its support, the library can expand beyond collection-related metrics to encompass all the ways the library interconnects with the program. Furthermore, by becoming proactively involved with the committee(s) responsible for managing institutional program reviews, libraries can contribute to the governance of this essential activity on campus. This paper describes one academic library's experience and efforts in becoming involved with undergraduate reviews at both the program and institutional levels. It is hoped that sharing our case study and the tools we have created, will benefit other academic libraries.
Western Libraries and Ingram Content Group worked together to establish a Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) program that has been incorporated into the regular acquisitions workflow at Western. Some features of the program include: all titles selected for addition to the PDA collection are filtered through the approval profiles established by the librarians, the library's holdings are uploaded to Ingram weekly so that duplicate titles are avoided, invoices for purchased PDA titles are sent weekly, and holdings for un-purchased and purchased PDA records are updated weekly. A PDA Working Group established the program at Western by meeting with collections librarians to assist with profile adjustments and ease concerns of how this method of acquisition would impact the collection. The Working Group is monitoring the program and gathering data to assess the impact of PDA. In addition to collecting information about titles loaded and titles purchased, an online survey to assess user response to e-books is continuing. Western and Ingram have continued to work together closely to ensure the program is successful and to make profile adjustments as necessary.
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