Abstract
In the library literature, a great deal of interest in patron-driven collection development has recently been expressed, especially in those programs that link acquisitions with interlibrary loan. However, the implementation of such programs has been limited, at least in part because of concerns over the potential for wasteful spending. The authors will attempt to address this common concern by assessing whether monies spent via a patron-driven acquisitions program were more or less effective than monies spent via traditional modes of acquisition.
Notes
1. As is frequently the case with a study of this sort, the law library was excluded from consideration.
2. The number of LC subclasses reported in an earlier study employing this dataset was 257. This discrepancy, and any other discrepancies between the two studies, was the result of a single ILL POD book that was misclassed as CM rather than CN. In the interval between the two studies, the cataloging staff was able to track down the rogue book and re-class it.
3. Prior to beginning the analysis of relative performance, the authors used SAS to test the distribution of book circulation rates (i.e., their annual turnover rates) for normalcy and then to perform a two-way factorial analysis of the dataset to determine whether, with respect to circulation as expressed via annual turnover rates, there were in the original dataset interaction effects attributable to means of acquisition and to LC subclass. In order to reduce noise effects that could have been caused by LC subclasses that did not have ILL acquisitions, the authors elected to use the subset of LC subclasses with circulated ILL acquisitions (137 subclasses; 66,396 books). The authors would tentatively offer the model constructed to fit the data as follows: Annual Turnover Rate = Acquisition Type + LC Subclass + (Acquisition Type x LC Subclasses). The model from the two-way factorial experiment was as shown below,
4. What any particular library may deem an “acceptable” value for these ratios is subjective, but for this study, the authors took into account the books’ average annual turnover rate (1 circulation every 2.38 years) and the fact that a supermajority of the books (70.4%) had been available for checkout for at least that long. We concluded that the books in the topical areas should have been checked out at least once, on average. Thus, to be “acceptable,” their average book price and their average price paid per circulation should be fairly nearly equal.
5. One might be inclined, at this point, to glance at the values graphed in Figures 2, 3, and 4 and to conclude that Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences & Technology all performed roughly similarly. However, the reader ought to keep in mind that the ratios reported were for performance within the topic groups. The ratios may mask differences in performance that result from differences in average price paid within the topic groups, hence the reporting of ratios relative to average price paid in the text. The Sciences & Technology group's absolute performance (i.e., its price paid per circulation) may appear to be roughly comparable to the Arts & Humanities group's in several instances, but the performance relative to average prices paid for the books in some Sciences & Technology topic groups was actually better because the average prices for Sciences & Technology books were higher. This struck the authors as noteworthy and as a bit of a surprise because the arts and humanities are generally considered more book-oriented and the STEM fields more journal-oriented.