Patron Driven Acquisition

Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) is a collection development program that ensures usage of every eBook or eAudiobook title your library purchases from NetLibrary. Through this program, your library provides a selection of titles for users to view. Once a title is accessed by a user, it is purchased by your library and automatically added to your collection. The PDA program is recommended for all library types and is an ideal supplement to existing collection development processes including group purchases.

With Patron Driven Acquisition, you define your overall collection development strategy while maintaining complete control over title selection and expenditures. A profile for each collection determines what type of content you'll make available, through specific criteria such as LCC/DDC ranges, subject headings, publication date ranges, publishers and price ranges per title.

Maintain Complete Control of your Collection
Because you've set the overall strategy through your profile, you maintain complete control of your collection and costs. Users simply select specific titles within the defined collection parameters through their accesses. Your library also has the option to pre-define the spending limit of your Patron Driven Acquisition program. Once the limit has been reached, automatic access is disabled.

Benefits of Patron Driven Acquisition

• Easy acquisition—it's automatic
• Proven usage of purchased titles
• A growing collection of more than 160,000 eBooks and eAudiobooks to choose from.

With this program, your library will add eBooks and eAudiobooks to your collection that meet the needs of your users. It makes title selection easy, as you can identify usage trends immediately.

How does it work?

It takes only a few steps to get started:

1. Complete a NetLibrary Patron Driven Acquisition profile
2. Add OCLC MARC records to your local catalog (provided free of charge)
3. Promote your new collection
4. Once a user accesses a title, your library automatically acquires it
5. Review usage data periodically to note trends
6. Add new content, as needed.

To learn more about Patron Driven Acquisition, please contact OCLC at 1-800-848-5878, ext. 5155 or libservices@oclc.org, or your Regional Service Provider.