Embracing Automation for Monograph Acquisition

摘要

At the beginning of 2014, the University of Alberta Libraries (UAL) began a major shift toward the automation of monograph collection development. UAL was looking to move the focus of liaison librarians toward other growth areas such as research data management and knew that some aspect of workload had to be reduced in order to accommodate new demands on liaison librarian time. UAL already had some experience with approval plans, but the majority of monograph purchasing at the time was being done by individual subject selectors (liaisons). The shift to shelf-ready approval plans without any supplemental slips or individual selection was a significant one, and the change seemed abrupt to many but came at a time when such change made sense and current technology enabled us to proceed. My colleague, Trish Chatterley, outlined the process of this change in a 2015 Against The Grain article, "Being Earnest with Collections - Rethinking Monographic Acquisitions in a Large Academic Library" (Chatterley, 2015).