Against The Grain - The Podcast

The Road Ahead? Patron-Driven Acquisition Might Become... Library patrons make use of many forms of content: journals, ebooks, videos, audio tracks, archival documents, musical scores, etc. Each of these content types is amenable to PDA and the technology certainly exists to deliver each of these content types in PDA. So what stands in the way? We consider the prospects for a future-state of PDA that is multimedia, universal in its publisher/provider inclusion and delivered in an "e-commerce," if you will, environment where the content providers and the library can engage in negotiated agreement on item subscription charges and the trigger to purchase, rather than these being set by the aggregator. In this panel we explore three trends propelling us toward this future state and three trends hindering this future state, and will solicit feedback from participants as to other trends we may have missed. Propelling: 1. Continually tightening library budgets 2. Gradual emergence of affordable, patron-driven models