Lean, Demand Driven Acquisition, and the Library

I am currently working with a variation of Lean for libraries - it's called demand driven or patron driven acquisition. The assumptions for demand driven acquisition are

• If one patron uses an item, it is much more likely someone else will use the item
• If patrons can find items, they will choose to use items

So, generally demand driven acquisition adds electronic items to a catalog and when the item is request the library purchases the item for the patron's use.

Is this Lean approach really good for libraries? Context matters for Lean. Think about Lean in the context of food supply for hunter-gathers. If you live in a tropical garden of Eden with a fairly constant food supply, storage is nonsensical. Gather, cook, and eat when you are hungry - there will be more later. However, if you live closer to the poles with wide seasonal variation, the equation changes - there will be lean times when little or no food is available. People have developed options to deal with this -

• Gather food when it is plentiful and preserve it for later use
• Migrate to areas with different seasonal patterns
• Ship food from areas with different season patterns

Each of these solutions involves one or more forms of wasted identified by Lean. And that doesn't mean those aren't the right solutions for those situations.

The Library context is an interesting challenge - Libraries have been traditionally been places that bought, stored, loaned, and sold physical items.¹ Many of the costs of libraries still revolve around storing, shipping and processing items. Open stacks make it possible for patrons to sample inventory and make borrowing decisions based on more than the entries in the catalog. Patrons may judge books by information conveyed on covers, surrounding items, and random samples pulled out of the text.

As we move to an electronic era with eBooks, streaming music, and streaming video the context has changed. Items can be purchased and delivered seamlessly to the patron. The supplier takes on the electronic storage costs. The library takes the responsibility to provide a communication connection to the supplier. In the context of reliable high speed internet, limited space, and limited budgets, this feels like the right solution.

As a librarian, I provide access to materials. Sometimes that means, I buy books. Sometimes it means adding a record to the catalog and buying the book when some patron wants it. And at some level I need to replicate the experience of wandering open stacks. And that is post for another day.

1. The separation between bookstores and libraries appears to  be fairly recent. The french cognate for library, librarie is translated as bookstore.