Okay, this is going to make me unpopular: I think patron-driven ebook acquisitions for an academic library is a terrible idea. There, I said it. I may have to eat my words. I sometimes balk at trends, only to change my mind. I thought patron tagging in online catalogs was a silly notion. I didn't buy the claims that ontology is overrated, that cataloging is useless (I think it's only semi-useless) and that users want to create their own categories and schemes of meaning (when in my experience all they really want is to find some books, preferably as quickly as possible). That was then. Now I want LibraryThing for Libraries like a kid who's petitioning Santa for the hot toy of the season. I didn't think our patrons would add tags (and now that our catalog has the option, sure enough-they don't) but importing relevant tags from the 65 million contributed by LibraryThing users like me would actually make our materials easier to find, and we would not lose the benefits of the controlled vocabulary of traditional cataloging. My only question is whether the added functionality in the catalog is worth the money that would probably have to come from the book budget, since we've cut periodicals and databases to the bone. When you have more avenues to discover books, but have no new books to discover, you're on the horns of a dilemma.

A passion for patron-driven

Maybe I will change my mind, but right now I'm digging in my heels once again. In recent months I have talked to librarians who are evangelists for letting patrons spend our acquisitions budget based on how many clicks a particular title gets in a shopping mall of ebooks. I should add that these librarians are already convinced that ebooks are where our acquisitions budget should go. But it's not clear to me if that's a conviction shared by their patrons. It seems to be a prediction combined with an assumption: this is what people will want as soon as they wake up to the new reality. A major thrust of the argument is that it's foolish to try to guess what books people will want in advance when you can virtually put a huge range of options on your shelves and let students and faculty pluck off the ones they want. The percentage of books that grow old without ever leaving the library's shelves is troubling, and this method of selection is a way to ensure that our dollars go to materials that are actually used. And once we work out the wrinkles, it will save us so much time and money and space. Vendors are coming on board. Yankee Book Peddler has announced a partnership with Ebook Library to merge patron-driven acquisitions with approval plans. (Their press release is a marvelous bowl of alphabet soup: "When a book fits the rules for a DDA [demand-driven acquisition] title, YBP alerts EBL, and EBL delivers a URL that goes into the bibliographic record. YBP sends the records to the library, which puts them in the OPAC." Did you catch all that?) There's a practical side to all this that is appealing. But a library is more than a shopping site built to satisfy immediate patron needs. A well-chosen collection is a cartography of knowledge that helps guide the novice researcher toward books that they would never think to ask for. Patron-driven acquisition puts an enormous amount of faith in catalogs. With all due respect, they work pretty well when you know what you're looking for, but I have yet to meet the metadata that is better than what cataloging and classification can provide in combination. Umberto Eco, who argued for library coffee shops decades before they became trendy, said at the opening of a new library in Milan that "the whole idea of a library is based on a misunderstanding: that the reader goes into the library to find a book whose title he knows." Its real purpose, he said, "is to discover books of whose existence the reader has no idea." For him, open stacks were a triumph. When libraries turn to ebooks, browsing will be circumscribed by the cleverness of your interface and the dimensions of your computer screen.

The consumable library

Supplying books that patrons (or should I say "customers"?) order from a catalog of possibilities alters the fundamental nature of libraries. The library is not a mall where individuals select the goods they plan to consume, like groceries or shoes. It's a commons, a resource for the entire community furnished with books that can be shared amongst ourselves and beyond local boundaries so that, by pooling our library holdings, we all can accommodate the unanticipated and occasional need. Sharing among libraries is something that most ebooks don't allow. And building a collection for the future seems to be a thing of the past. This move toward patron-driven ebook acquisition continues the trajectory set by purchasing articles on demand to avoid subscribing to journals at a ruinous price. This doesn't solve the problem. It simply provides a temporary fix, applying market logic to a system that evades market corrections. People who would never shell out $30 for an article that may or may not be useful are content with those prices-so long as the library picks up the tab. The trend to view libraries as merely the purchaser of intellectual property raises the question of why we should invest in libraries and library staff when our function is merely to handle bills for consumables?

Finding a balance

In spite of all the hype, I suspect the future will occupy some middle ground. We will likely set aside some funding to purchase ebooks chosen by clicks, but retain a substantial portion of our budgets for choices made by subject specialists inside and outside the library. We probably will insist on some means of sharing materials, even if publishers resist; one way to do that, open access publishing of monographs, is an area of increasing interest. Beyond that, it's worth acknowledging patrons have driven acquisitions for decades. We seek suggestions, pay attention to the subjects that are most in demand, check in with faculty about new courses and programs, and catch items requested through interlibrary loan that are likely to be used repeatedly. When a student or faculty member recommends a book, we almost always buy it. It's how we've always done things. That's a future I can live with.

---

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published in May by Minotaur Books.