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Abstract
The Purdue University Libraries was an early implementer of purchasing books requested through interlibrary loan rather than borrowing the requested books. The service, called Books on Demand, began in January 2000. An analysis of the requests at the end of the first two years of service indicated that these patron-selected books were more likely to have repeat circulations than the books acquired through normal collection development processes. When the program reached its tenth year, the authors analyzed and compared the books purchased through Books on Demand with all other purchased books during the same period. Findings indicate that books acquired through this user-initiated program have higher circulation rates than books acquired through the normal selection channels. The difference is quite large, a mean of 4.1 compared to a mean of 2.4, when the first interlibrary loan use is included as a circulation. Therefore, the authors recommend that libraries investigate a service of purchasing books requested via interlibrary loan as a complement to other collection development efforts.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledge Amy Winks for extracting the raw data from the Clio and ILLiad databases.
Notes
1. A follow-up of this 2002 study is published in this journal issue. (See Anderson et al. 2010).