This study utilized dissertation bibliographies produced at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, a STEM-oriented university, to ascertain how well Purdue's Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education Library supports doctoral research. To examine a critical mass of data, the authors gathered all the bibliographies of dissertations written in 11 disciplines within the College of Liberal Arts in 2011 and 2015. Data for each citation included year of publication, language, format type, and local availability in print or digitally. Revealing disciplinary trends in using sources, this study provided critical information for reconceptualizing the library's orientation to learning and research and for engaging with faculty to understand where to strengthen the library's collections.

Many academic libraries have experimented with e-book patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) plans as small projects to test the concept of offering users thousands of titles, yet only paying for them as they are used. At the same time, many librarians continue traditional patterns of buying e-book titles the same way they bought print books for decades—purchasing titles based on their belief that these selections will be ones that local users need. This study shows that many librarian-selected e-book titles suffer the same fate as the traditional model of librarian-selected print books: many receive little or no use. The PDA model is far more effective, both by making large numbers of titles available and by leveraging tight collections budgets. This paper analyzes cost and use factors of three years of data from the Purdue University Libraries’ PDA plan, and examines the same factors for librarian-selected e-books during the same time period. The authors conclude that it may be time to consider moving PDA from its current role as a small ancillary collection development tool to become a major component of an academic library’s monograph collection development program and to suggest that selectors modify their title-by-title selection habits for e-books. the Use of Print books Most academic librarians are aware of the flood of articles starting in the 1960s demonstrating that high percentages of librarian-selected books were seldom or never used. One of the earliest and most widely cited studies 8 128 | Academic E-Books is Trueswell’s (1969) “Some Behavior Patterns of Library Users: The 80/20 Rule,” which concluded that 20% of an academic library collection receives 80% of the use. Numerous later studies conducted in different sizes and types of academic libraries all confirmed some variation of Trueswell’s findings: a relatively small percentage of a collection accounts for the lion’s share of the use. Some authors also reported that large percentages of their collections received no use during the first few years after acquisition, after which the likelihood of any circulation activity was extremely low (Bulick, Sabor, & Flynn, 1979, pp. 9–18; Hardesty, 1981, p. 266). Rather than take the space to cite these studies here, the authors suggest that interested readers consult Ward’s (2015, pp. 25–29) summary of these and other reports of use studies over the past 50 years. It is worth noting, however, that this phenomenon is not limited to the distant past. As recently as 2010, Nixon and Saunders (2010, pp. 151–161) reported that 46,996 (33%) of the 141,112 books purchased for the circulating collection of a large research library between 2000 and 2009 were never checked out. However, the authors also reported that during this same time period, patrons subsequently checked out 82% of the books purchased through their library’s interlibrary loan (ILL) print PDA service following the first use by the requesting ILL patron. This last finding dramatically underscores the point that patrons are good judges, at least in the short and medium term, of choosing titles that other patrons will use. Use studies for librarian-selected and patronselected print books confirm that patrons are in fact better judges than librarians when it comes to identifying books that will meet the needs of the local user population. Does this phenomenon also hold true now that academic libraries have embraced the e-book?

A recent survey of collection librarians at large academic libraries with patron-driven e-book acquisition programs (e-book PDA) has shown that a majority of these librarians support the programs and believe that patrons choose good quality e-books that have higher circulation rates than e-books selected by librarians. E-book PDA is becoming an increasingly common method of building digital collections in large academic libraries. In smaller academic libraries, however, there are still relatively few e-book PDA programs. To get some idea of how many e-book PDA programs there are in smaller academic libraries, to learn about the directors’ attitudes toward such programs, and to see whether attitudes vary according to the size of the institutions, the authors conducted a survey of directors of libraries in Academic Libraries of Indiana (ALI), an association of mostly small academic libraries. With responses from 28 out of 73 ALI directors, the survey revealed that 82% (n=23) of the libraries do not have e-book PDA programs, even though 82% (n=23) of the directors, regardless of the size of their institution, have positive attitudes toward the propositions that patrons would choose good quality e-books that these e-books would likely circulate. Reasons given for the directors’ reluctance to pursue e-book PDA include the lack of time and of staff, concerns with the wide variety of ways e-books are accessed, and the resistance of some patrons to e-books. The authors address these concerns and encourage smaller institutions to consider e-book PDA.

The Pur due University Libraries was an early implementer of purchasing rather than borrowing books requested through inter-library loan. This pioneering user-initiated acquisitions program, started in January 2000 and called Books on Demand, is managed by the interlibrary loan unit. Now that the program has reached its tenth year, the authors revisit their initial 2002 study to analyze books purchased in the six top subject areas across the whole decade. In their review of the liberal arts titles selected, subject librarians found that the books were appropriate additions and that these titles expanded the cross-disciplinary nature of the collection. The Books on Demand service offers a seamless method for all users, especially graduate students, to provide input into the collection building process.

Libraries exist for their users, so librarians take user needs into consideration when building collections. In the past, this consideration took many forms. Past use suggested that more books of a similar nature would receive future use. The librarians’ knowledge about a particular user community’s interest in certain topics drove other choices; a public library collection in a rural area would include books on some topics unlikely to interest urban dwellers, for example. Academic libraries would emphasize subjects taught or researched at the institution. A small liberal arts college’s collection would focus on some different subject areas than a polytechnic institution. A museum library might buy few titles outside the field of the fine and decorative arts. Traditionally, librarians relied on book reviews, publisher reputation, and professional intuition to guide them in the selection of books for their patrons. While most librarians seriously considered users’ requests for specific titles if they met the library’s collection development policies, in general librarians selected the vast majority of titles. To borrow a term from industry, librarians historically built collections on the “just in case” inventory model. Starting in the late 1970s, the results of several studies showed that users in major academic library collections checked out an astonishingly low percentage of these largely librarian-selected books (Kent 1979). One frequently cited study revealed that 20% of the collection receives 80% of the use (Trueswell 1969). These studies suggested that the traditional model of librarian-selected titles does not serve users, at least not at academic institutions, as well as librarians expected. At the same time, skyrocketing interlibrary loan (ILL) figures from the Association of Research Libraries member libraries also indicated that local collections do not meet needs adequately (Libraries 2009, 9). Certainly some of the ILL traffic is for unusual, obscure,

In 2000, the Purdue University Libraries implemented a Books on Demand program. Instead of borrowing books requested through Interlibrary Loan, staff purchased selected titles and added them to the collection after patron use. After two years, five subject bibliographers analyzed 800 titles acquired through the program in their subject areas and compared them with titles acquired during the same time period through normal selection. The bibliographers concluded that the patron-driven Books on Demand program is a valuable complementary collection development tool. It consistently adds a very high percentage of relevant scholarly titles to the collection which provides input from patrons who do not ordinarily have a voice in collection development decisions and fills in gaps in interdisciplinary areas.