Increase usage with demand-driven acquisition

For years, librarians at Bucknell University had noticed a growing trend: materials purchased through standard acquisitions processes were used only about 20% of the time. But, items purchased based on student or faculty requests were used more than 80% of the time and usually more than once. Taking advantage of this observation, however, required a library management system that could streamline discovery-to-delivery processes considerably in order to meet users' expectations.

"OCLC WorldShare^® Management Services allows us to integrate borrowing and buying in a single stream," explained Jennifer Clarke, Assistant Director of Library Collection Development & Access Services at Bucknell. "We've been able to go to an exclusive demand-driven acquisition (DDA) model because WorldCat^®, ILLiad^® and WorldShare Acquisitions work so well together."

Jennifer also appreciates how, with WorldShare Management Services (WMS), her library no longer has to make changes when new technology or standards come along, such as implementing RDA. "OCLC does that for us. Of course, we don't have to maintain local hardware," she continued. "And we don't have to do the work of loading, maintaining and deleting local records in a separate system."

With the money saved by implementing WMS, Bucknell library staff have been able to purchase a new institutional repository system. And with the time saved, they've been able to reallocate work for several positions, doing new things like adding the Bucknell faculty's new publications to the institutional repository, marketing the library and promoting library programs.

Jennifer also likes that her library's work helps improve data for all OCLC members. "We used to talk about how, in our library, we were updating data and adding and enhancing records just for the benefit of our local library. And that probably hundreds, if not thousands, of others catalogers were probably doing the same thing at the very same time. Now when we update records, we do it for the benefit of the world. We're really pretty happy about that."

Library at a glance

• Located in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania
• The largest liberal arts university in the US with 3,400 undergraduate and 150 graduate students
• The merged library/IT department has 80 staff members, 25 of whom are dedicated to the library