Target Audience: Collection development librarians, acquisitions librarians, catalogers, and systems librarians
Learning Outcomes:
1) Participants will be able to negotiate a shared patron-driven e-book acquisitions plan that meets the needs of individual institutions.
2) Participants will be able to identify and evaluate opportunities for inter-institutional collaboration in e-book collection development.
This program describes the experiences of two state university law schools that joined forces to craft a shared patron-driven acquisitions program with a common vendor. Building a shared e-book collection among the state university libraries in Florida has been talked about for some time, though budget cuts and reorganization have prevented it from becoming a reality. Forced to look at creative ways to maximize acquisitions budgets, the law libraries at Florida State University and University of Florida worked with Ingram Coutts to adopt a shared PDA plan for legal monographs. By combining resources, the libraries were able to provide their users access to far more titles than would have been possible with individual plans. In this presentation, each school will discuss working together and with the vendor to create a shared profile, how they were able to exclude titles already owned or preferred in print, and how the PDA dovetails with each school’s collection development goals. They will also share how the plan impacted their individual budgets, workflows, and library management systems, as well as how it was received by users. A representative from Ingram Coutts will discuss the challenges and benefits of developing a single PDA plan that would meet the individual needs of two separate law schools. How these rival schools came together and whether they are still partners in this effort will be presented by three players on this unlikely team.