Model Construction And Operation Management Of Patron-Driven Acquisitions

Under the traditional model of collection building, the task of Collection development in a library is to be mainly completed by librarians especially subject librarians, librarians often acquire resources based on some factors such as the established purpose of collection building, budget, faculty structure and scale, usage rate, technologies and equipments existing, whose aim is not only to meet current information needs of users, but also to meet the future information needs of users by purchasing and storage resources. Although ensuring diversities, comprehensiveness and long-term accessibility of resources, this model of collection building based on Just-in-Case leads to many problems such as shortage of funds, low usage rate, lack of space. With the continuous development of librarianship, the user-centered concept has been widely accepted, under the main premise of acquisition by librarians, libraries have carried out interlibrary loan, purchasing commission of users, as well as readers’ recommendations to meet marginal information needs, but this, after all, is only a secondary means of collection building, which does not radically change the problems faced by libraries. In order to better deal with this situation, libraries begin to try new ideas and methods of collection building, after 2000, more and more libraries of European and American countries(especially the United States) began to practice a model whose essence is Just-in-Time, that is Patron-driven acquisitions (PDA), the biggest feature of which is that acquisitions of resources in libraries must be the premise of users’ requests, in other words, libraries must entirely rely on users to select resources with respect to Just-in-Case. The implement of PDA can optimize the structure of collections, improve the rate of resources utilization, save space, reduce budget, reduce the burden of librarians, as well as motivate users to jointly participate in collection building, which outshines the traditional model. With the rapid development of modern information technology, e-commerce, digital publishing and the changing of users’ information needs and reading habits, Patron-Driven Acquisitions will be more and more accepted, and the prosperity of theory studies and practice will be presented.Compared with the mature theory studies and practices of PDA in European and American countries (especially the United States, Britain, Germany, etc.), Asian Pacific countries (especially Australia, Singapore, Japan and Korea, etc.), as well as Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, the mainland of China is still in the stage of theoretical research, and the specific practice has not been carried out. Therefore, in the first place, this paper use the method of literature research and comparative analysis to find out the differences and emphases of theoretical research findings existing at home and abroad; Secondly, on the basis of briefly describing the overall practice situation of PDA in foreign countries, this paper presented three PDA programs in detail, which include the PDA in The Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois, the PDA in University of Glasgow, and the PDA in Joint University Librarians Advisory Committee(Hong Kong), meanwhile, summarized the successful experiences among them; Then, proposed components of PDA model through induction method, and constructed Print-PDA model and eBook-PDA model based on SmartLib Service of Nanjing University Library through modeling method; And then, this paper proposed the operation mechanisms and management strategies of models constructing before, operation mechanisms include front control mechanism, feedback mechanisms, evaluation mechanisms and sustainable development mechanisms, and management strategies such as actively building the interest chain of collaborative PDA, drawing up the implementation plans and details on the basis of needs analysis, daily management and periodical assessment, as well as actively building the alliance-based PDA, etc. Finally, put forward the research insufficient on the basis of conducting this paper, and believed that some issues will be the direction of future research which contain the standardized control and the transformation of librarian role during the implementation of PDA, also the construction of win-win mechanism in the context of PDA,and so on.