We are going to try some changes to the way in which we handle patron-driven e-book purchases. In particular, we are going to trial moving from mediated patron-driven requests to non-mediated.

The outcome of this would be that when a customer discovers a patron-driven catalogue record and requests access, the step of a librarian (Library Support Services staff) approving the recommendation for purchase (and access subsequently granted 24-48 hours later) would be removed. Instead, the purchase would happen straightaway (and theoretically full access to the book would be available as well).

The reasons we want to give this a try are as follows. We are hearing from a number of our customers that they are frustrated by the delay between recommending a patron-driven title and getting access. Since implementing patron-driven requesting in March, we have placed nearly 300 patron-driven orders. All of these recommendations have been suitable for the collection. The patron-driven records that are in our catalogue have already been subjected to a basic profile to weed out publishers and titles that are less likely to be of relevance to UC. Because customers have to authenticate through EZProxy in order to recommend a patron-driven title for purchase, we are already assured they are affiliated to the University of Canterbury. We will put a price cap in so the budget can be controlled.

We will set this up over the next few days and see how it goes. If it turns out there are undesirable consequences we didn’t anticipate, we will revisit this decision.

Tim Stedman