Part IV. Conclusion

Assessing demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) program workflows is important, but one of the things that it demonstrates is that no acquisitions strategy exists in a vacuum. Libraries are complex institutions and collection building has the potential to impact all teams within the library and our entire community. This is why it is important to understand the way new workflows like DDA impact collection building and experiment within the system to optimize DDA for each individual library. Many libraries struggle to get DDA programs off the ground because of budget, staffing, or buy-in from the community. There is also resistance to these programs because of fears that patrons will not make good decisions for the collection or that DDA diminishes the work of librarians. Through the examples in this book we have seen many different types of libraries and many styles of DDA.

In the transition from simple patron requests, to interlibrary loan-to-purchase programs, and then on to catalog-integrated ebook DDA, librarians have taken a strategy for fulfilling patron needs and streamlined it for the technologies we have available now. This strategy has the power to improve collection building and increase patron satisfaction and it is adaptable enough to fit in to any library program. In this volume, we outlined the basic options libraries have when setting up DDA programs and discussed several parameters that can have big effects on the outcomes of these programs. We looked into the research around cost, collection diversity, collection standards, usage, and workflow and preservation to help clarify the data that other libraries have drawn from these programs and set benchmarks for comparing our own DDA programs. We then focused on issues specific to academic, public, and other types of libraries with case studies from the field and research from these areas. Through this process we have looked at many different types of DDA programs from many different libraries and hopefully within these examples are useful ideas for improving DDA assessment in your library.

The meaning of DDA has changed so much over the past several years and it will likely continue to change in many ways. The future of DDA publishing might include restrictions in perpetual access from publishers and a refocusing on pay-per-view strategies and it could include changes to the data that publishers provide or even a charge of libraries to access their own data. There has been a shift in the way we pay for journal articles already with consumer available pay-per-view and various services marketed to libraries like Get It Now and ReadCube. If these strategies continue to be profitable it might push monograph purchasing more towards access and away from perpetual purchase, which is not necessarily a fundamentally bad thing for libraries. DDA in many institutions represents a refocusing of library energies away from collection building for the collection’s sake and towards measurable fulfillment of patrons’ needs. Fulfilling patrons’ needs was already a focal goal for many institutions so DDA represents a new way of enacting this goal rather than a strong departure from traditional library roles. There are also institutions that build collections for other reasons and it is unlikely that the future will bring a mandate that these institutions board the DDA train.

Future developments from vendors might also see the development of more systems that are devoted to dealing with the complexity of modern libraries in a way that is seamless for our users. We investigated one of these systems in Teachers College’s DocDel, a platform that was built to simplify the process of research for end users while organizing requests and enabling new material types for library staff. As the types of materials patrons request diversify, systems like this might rise up to manage rights, delivery, and sharing. Systems we already use may also start expanding to fill this gap. ILLiad fulfills this function for the Copyright Clearance Center’s Get It Now program and it is easy to imagine a system like ILLiad expanding to accommodate different kinds of materials.

DDA might also develop a social element. Researchers supported by grant funding through Beifang Ethnic University and the National Natural Science Foundation of China created a platform that prompted users to “vote” for the purchase of materials through the library catalog when performing searches (Yu, Wang, & Yang, 2015). This could be an interesting new avenue for DDA and brings in elements of crowdfunding structures like Kickstarter. What if patrons were given a share of library resources that they could use to vote on major purchases like serials and ebook packages. It is of course likely that the most frequently requested materials, at least for academic libraries, would be textbooks, but allocating more money towards patron needs and giving patrons a stronger voice in collection development might be a positive marketing strategy for libraries.

DDA programs might cause libraries to rethink their roles for patrons and for other institutions, but this development is just one factor in a process that has been happening in libraries for decades. Budget and space constraints along with the ever-expanding universe of information has meant that creating a comprehensive collection that anticipates user needs is a farther stretch than ever before. Libraries used to take pride in the size of their collections (Miller, 2011) and this still may be the case going into the future, but DDA has given us new metrics to judge our own worth and some of these are more closely aligned with our users’ ideas of our worth than simple volume counts.

The future may bring increasing specialization of academic research libraries. As we move into the future, libraries will have the freedom to focus on their key strengths and leave the rest to access. We, as librarians, have to move towards comfort with loss. Librarians working today will have the opportunity to see “out of print” go out of print and be able to access anything we need as soon as we think to need it, but at the same time we will experience huge tides of creation and loss. Things are ephemeral in a way they never were before and it is possible that our understanding and attitude towards loss will evolve as well. There is no longer any way to keep everything. The internet is a thing of loss. Making peace with this will mean forging a new destiny for libraries as places of exchange rather than storage. Delivery matters and delivering the right materials to the right patrons at the right times will continue to be the mission of libraries. Ebooks simply give us more data about how we are doing that and DDA gives us the tools to adapt our strategy to the cues of our patrons.

For most institutions, balanced collection-building cannot be accomplished through DDA alone. The actions and activities of librarians in technical services and front-facing roles are still essential for helping all functions in the information process: identifying user needs, planning and tweaking acquisitions strategies and workflows, and assessing the outcomes. DDA shifts the focus of our attention in the acquisitions process, but it can never be successful without the thoughtful stewardship of librarians. Assessment is the key to focusing our infinitely expanding universe of materials and strategies. Our work is not reducing, but rather changing form. Librarians are working harder to maintain information structures that look easier and work better for patrons (Covi & Cragin, 2004). Assessment can be a bridge towards explaining and justifying this work. Libraries have come so far so fast that we should not fail now to show the power and effectiveness of our work.