Laura Costello, in Evaluating Demand-Driven Acquisitions, 2017
Critics of DDA programs in academic libraries argue that the influence of publishers in the selection process will corrupt collections (Sens & Fonseca, 2013), that fulfilling immediate access needs will lead to the creation of unbalanced collections that do not stand the test of time (Price & McDonald, 2009), and that relying on patrons to drive acquisition serves some groups better than others. These criticisms are all true to a certain extent and indicate that a diverse and multifaceted acquisitions strategy is essential for academic libraries. With the rise of scholarly ebooks, package deals and automated strategies have joined selected and recurring purchases in academic libraries, with many libraries juggling all of these strategies at once. Electronic content has enabled purchasing everything from large package deals to granular purchasing at the article level and an increase at purchasing specific titles at the point of need may be more beneficial to libraries than package deals, a strategy that also caused much strife in academic institutions (Schroeder, Wright, & Murdoch, 2010). The concerns associated with DDA are well outlined in the literature, and all of these concerns should be considered, but increasingly DDA is an essential part of a balanced acquisitions strategy for academic libraries and there is evidence that for some academic libraries this strategy has increased usage, diversified the collection, and lowered costs.