Abstract
Excerpt: Purchase on demand is the latest Big Thing in collections and acquisitions, judging from the conferences I've gone to in the past couple of years. At the Association of College and Research Libraries’ 2008 conference I attended a session presented by Ed O’Neill of OCLC and Julie Gammon of OhioLINK discussing the preliminary results of OhioLINK's Collection Analysis Project. This analysis looked at the 2007 and 2008 circulation rates for the shared OhioLINK collections. There was a great deal of interesting information, but what I most remember is their discovery that the old 80/20 rule (80% of circulation comes from 20% of the collection) was, for them, closer to 80/6. This is something of a gut punch for a collection manager. My library budget certainly hasn't grown in the past several years, and I cringe when I think of all of that invested in an unused monograph collection. Purchase on demand ensures at least one bang for your buck.