Introduction
In The Patron-Driven Library: A Practical Guide for Managing Collections and Services in the Digital Age, the author, DeeAnn Allison, provides a perspective of the ways by which library managers can harness the forces of change – both technological and demographic – to deliver services that meet user expectations in the 21st century. Her aim is to show how librarians can move from the traditional collection-centric view of the library to a patron-centric view, supported by the latest tools that information technology has to offer.
The author is the Director of Computing Operations and Research Services and Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. With a career spent in special and academic libraries, her passion for using technology to improve the user experience becomes apparent as one reads the book. It is pertinent to note, though, that this book has been written by one who has spent the major part of her career working in a large academic library. This book is a recent publication in the Chandos Information Professional Series and attempts to cover quite a bit of ground within 308 pages.
The book is divided into two parts: in the first part, the author describes the changing landscape of users and services to lay the ground for expectations of a new generation of patrons; in the second part, she covers a range of topics such as information literacy, collection management, digitisation, the role of librarians as advocates and the future of librarians and library services to show that the change needs to be pervasive so that services can be delivered in new ways and new services, which enhance the user experience, to the library’s patrons.
It is somewhat disappointing to find little in the book that is new or born of the author’s insight. One appreciates that a key feature of this book is to provide “a synthesis of current research on the impact of technology on behaviour” and connect it with library services. Even so, one is left feeling that certain topics merit greater exposition, and that certain areas could have been explored. For instance, although a significant part of the book touches on various aspects of collection management (Chapters 5 – Collaborative collections, 7 – Metrics for decisions and 9 – Digital collections), there is no discussion of life cycle collection management in the book.
Chapter 8 – The extensible library – is where the author shares her vision of how technology can be harnessed to transform the library’s services, and this chapter contains the soul of the book. While these new services are typically associated with academic libraries in large institutions today, it is worth bearing in mind that when students from such institutions join the workforce, their expectations will, to a certain extent, have been shaped from their time as students – and some may well expect similar services at their workplace.
Interestingly, every chapter begins with an abstract and a set of keywords, which makes for easy reading. The author includes figures and tables at relevant junctures to illustrate the point that she’s endeavouring to explain (e.g. a list of social networking sites that readers could use for professional development is inserted where the author is trying to emphasise the need for continued learning). The book would have benefited from a concluding section at the end of each chapter to wrap-up the main takeaways.
In the opinion of this reviewer, the book might well be useful as a refresher for librarians in the sense that it can update them on a number of topics. Students of library studies may also find it to be a handy compendium, and the author has generously provided 34 pages of references for further reading.
