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Patron-driven acquisition has been an important, if contentious, topic for decades, with numerous programs having been piloted, adopted, and reported on, largely favorably, in the library literature. Still, questions and doubts persist for academic libraries, especially where the composition of vendor plans and packages and the judgment of patrons are concerned. Past literature has approached the assessment of patron-driven acquisition by analyzing circulation/usage, comparing peer-library holdings, seeking patrons' or librarians' judgments of utility and suitability, looking for evidence of collection imbalances, and testing for overlap in patrons' and librarians' purchases. To contribute to this literature, this study addresses scholarly impact and examines whose selections--approval plans', librarians', or patrons'--have been most heavily cited. For the social sciences, the sciences, and the humanities, the authors gathered topic-matched random samples of books acquired via approval plans and librarian orders during the first five years of operation of their institutions' interlibrary loan purchase-on-demand patrondriven acquisition program and compared their citation counts to the counts of books acquired via the program. Google Scholar was employed to tally citations.

Recently, a great deal of literature on patron-driven acquisition (PDA) has been published that addresses the implementation and results of PDA programs at academic libraries. However, despite widespread worries that PDA will lead to unbalanced collections, little attention has been paid to whether patrons' and librarians' purchasing differ significantly. This study analyzes librarians' and PDA patrons' acquisitions at an academic library by relative collecting level and by subject (that is, Library of Congress class and subclass) to determine whether concern over patrons' collecting are warranted.

The library literature on collection development has recently seen a spate of publications and presentations on patron-driven acquisitions (PDA). The bulk of this literature has addressed the implementation and touted the successes of PDA at academic libraries, yet a counter literature has been developing, much of it addressing the potential failings of library patrons as selectors. There has been little focus, however, on patrons' potentially problematic behaviors as post-purchase users of PDA materials. This study aimed to discover whether library patrons might in effect be monopolizing print books purchased via PDA via circulation renewals. The study found that there was a statistically significant difference in the proportions of circulated and circulated-and-renewed books acquired via PDA, librarians' orders, and approval plan selection. The study also found that ratios of renewals to circulations for circulated-and-renewed approval plan books were significantly greater than were the ratios for librarians' and PDA books, generally, and for books available for more than one year but less than six years. There were no significant differences for books available for one year or less. PDA books' renewal-to-circulation ratios were significantly greater than those of approval plan books only for books that had circulated a single time. KEYWORDS: patron-driven acquisition, collection use, print books, academic libraries, patron behaviors, INTRODUCTION It has been variously referred to in the library literature devoted to collection development as books on demand, buy not borrow, collaborative collection development, demand-driven acquisitions, direct purchase, just-in-time [...]

Introduction Among academic librarians, collection development has long been considered a vital duty, if not something of a nigh-sacred trust and exercise of librarians' authority and judgment. (1) Over the [...]

Patron-driven acquisition has been an important, if contentious, topic for decades, with numerous programs having been piloted, adopted, and reported on, largely favorably, in the library literature. Still, questions and doubts persist for academic libraries, especially where the composition of vendor plans and packages and the judgment of patrons are concerned. Past literature has approached the assessment of patron-driven acquisition by analyzing circulation/usage, comparing peer-library holdings, seeking patrons' or librarians' judgments of utility and suitability, looking for evidence of collection imbalances, and testing for overlap in patrons' and librarians' purchases. To contribute to this literature, this study addresses scholarly impact and examines whose selections--approval plans', librarians', or patrons'--have been most heavily cited. For the social sciences, the sciences, and the humanities, the authors gathered topic-matched random samples of books acquired via approval plans and librarian orders during the first five years of operation of their institutions' interlibrary loan purchase-on-demand patrondriven acquisition program and compared their citation counts to the counts of books acquired via the program. Google Scholar was employed to tally citations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2005, EBSCO introduced a comprehensive database for sociology that could be a competitor for Sociological Abstracts, SocINDEX/SocINDEX with Full Text. Library science quickly produced a product review, a few general comparative analyses of the two, and a few comparative analyses of the databases' utility for particular populations of researchers/students. The authors hope to add to this literature with an analysis of the databases' utility for graduate students in sociology completing their theses and dissertations. The citation checking variation of the checklist method was employed for four random samples of cited items, and the authors' sampling frame was theses and dissertations accepted at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln during the 2000-2010 interval. The authors found that neither database provided particularly good coverage of the literature cited, that SocINDEX provided superior coverage of cited peer-reviewed journal articles, that neither database provided impressive coverage of other sorts of literature, and that SocINDEX's broader approach to indexing subjects of interest to sociologists could be beneficial to graduate students in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a flurry of interest in programs for collection development through patron-initiated requests. However, some librarians have been concerned that such methods run the risk of producing idiosyncratic collections with poor usage and poor use value. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries have operated such a program through the Interlibrary Loan Department over a five-year period. The following study assesses the relative performance of the program's interlibrary loan-acquired monographs in terms of prices paid per rates of annual circulation, relative use at the topical level, and annual rates of circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Librarians, faculty, and professional researchers, and students already encounter difficulties in locating journal articles for the field of archaeology, yet, in the current budgetary climate, librarians needing to reduce subscription costs may be tempted to cancel smaller, discipline-specific indexes in favor of large multi-subject indexes with broad coverage. This study examines and compares the coverage provided to 208 archaeology and archaeology-related journals and magazines by six multi-subject indexes and by anthropology's primary index, Anthropological Literature, over a twenty year period (1988-2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a prior edition of this study, we examined whether the established online communication studies indexes-Communication Abstracts, ComIndex, and ComAbstracts-provided a good avenue of access to the journal literature that researchers in the field cite and whether, where the current journal literature was concerned, that avenue of access might be equal or superior to that provided by large, multisubject online indexes. In this iteration of the study, we similarly address EBSCO's new product for communication studies, Communication & Mass Media Complete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Librarians, faculty and professional researchers, and students often encounter difficulties in locating pertinent journal articles for the field of archaeology. This article examines the coverage given to ninety-three archaeology journals originating ill the United States over a fifty-year interval by twelve discipline-specific and subject-oriented indexes available online. The coverage provided by the individual indexes and some of the larger issues surrounding the coverage of the field itself are discussed, and several recommendations are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]