Notes on Operations: Patron Driven Acquisitions: Determining the Metrics for Success

Abstract

Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) programs have been established in many libraries, but there is no agreed upon set of metrics to evaluate the programs’ performance. With that in mind, the University of Arizona (UA) formed the On-Demand Information Delivery (ODID) Metrics Team in January 2012 to establish metrics to evaluate their PDA program. This paper examines the results of the team’s findings and provides an extensive analysis of the purchases by Library of Congress (LC) classification, publisher, format, etc. The discussion includes an analysis of the process and challenges of measuring a PDA program based on UA’s experience. This paper also provides a list of key metrics that the authors argue that every library with a PDA program should monitor.