I recently attended the 30th Annual Charleston Conference. The conference ran from Wednesday to Saturday with hundreds of sessions of every conceivable subject of interest to academic librarians and vendors. With so many sessions and speakers, it is difficult to define an overall theme, but the subject of Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) was the focus of many of the presentations. Rick Anderson from the University of Utah made this business model the subject of his plenary presentation. He argued that in the print era, when books and articles were difficult to find and expensive to distribute, it made sense for libraries to build large and expensive, "just-in-time" collections. Rick argued that this collection building model transitioned the electronic environment with the "Big Deal", forcing libraries to pay for material that their users do not need or use.
One of the jokes at the conference was that "flat is the new increase". Rick argued that with library budgets declining and an electronic environment that enables resource discovery the traditional collections building model ceases to make sense. What makes more sense is to respond to users' needs and eliminate waste, by acquiring only the material (books or articles) that they need. At the University of Utah, this policy extends not only to electronic content, but also to print, where they have an Espresso Book Machine, to produce print copies on demand.
Another hot topic of the conference was going mobile, as phones, Kindles and iPads drive user demand for content delivery on the go. Publishers are struggling to keep up and to decide which content will be converted to support specific device formats, what the business model should be and what role DRM will play. Publishers are considering which Apps to develop and how to monetise them. There was no consensus on the answers, but there is a great deal of experimentation going on with IEE, Springer and OCLC for example, all testing mobile delivery."
- Lorraine Estelle, CEO, JISC Collections
