Demand-Driven Success: Designing Your PDA Experiment

Abstract

Initiating demand-driving acquisition is daunting. Implications for developing a sustainable budget model, choosing a vendor, controlling metadata, monitoring purchases and developing invoice workflows are significant areas of concern that require determinative planning. From mid-February through August 2011, Loyola Marymount University conducted a pilot using demand-driven acquisition; the result of this successful experiment was the library's decision to fully integrate this purchasing model into its operations. In this session, we will share our process and qualifying decision criteria for configuring the experiment, monitoring its progress and assessing the results. Using an already established vendor, we assessed the purchase trigger model, controlled the number of titles in disciplines profiled, created a process for identifying and suppressing bibliographic records, developed a workflow for payment, and created a reporting format to monitor expenditures and content purchased. We will demonstrate how careful planning allowed us to safeguard against over expenditure and confidently expand or curtail use of the budget in a highly responsive fashion. The presentation will also examine other factors that influenced the experiment, such as the research environment and support from administration, and explain our marketing perspective and desirable outcomes for collection building.