Building collections at all (Re: Building collections in a bad economy)

[Rick Anderson <rick.anderson@utah.edu>]

> collection-building in these very difficult times and have been 
> struck by the fact that there is little discussion of testing 
> on-demand services.

Joe, there is a actually quite a lot of discussion going on in 
the library world around this issue, and experiments are in fact 
being conducted.  Greg and Scott have both alluded to some of 
them.  At my institution we're in the second phase of a fairly 
large-scale experiment with on-demand ebook purchasing using a 
system whereby many ebook records are loaded into our catalog and 
only those that are actually used by patrons get purchased and 
added to our permanent collection -- records for the unused 
titles eventually disappear.  A good number of other research 
libraries are conducting similar tests.  We're also looking very 
seriously at purchasing an Espresso Book Machine, which would 
allow us to print and bind books on demand -- selling them to 
patrons where ownership is desired, and adding them to our 
collections (with exceptions) where it isn't.  (Given our 
relatively poor track record at guessing what people will want, 
demonstrated patron interest in a particular title seems like as 
good a collecting criterion as any.)

Here's the really radical question, though: why are most of us 
building permanent collections at all anymore?  As Greg pointed 
out, in very many cases we can now respond to patrons' expressed 
needs quickly enough that buying speculatively seems like a poor 
use of money -- especially in the current budget environment. 
It's already kind of silly for patrons to use our catalogs as 
discovery tools, since any library's collection represents only a 
tiny fraction of the material that is actually available on any 
given topic.  Since our patrons tend now to be searching through 
a much larger segment of the information universe than we could 
ever hope to collect ahead of time, why don't we focus on fast 
fulfillment rather than wasting money on stuff no one wants?

Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. For Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
Univ. of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu