About acquisitions:

A core part of the Collection Development process, Acquisitions involves the process of budgeting, ordering, receiving, and processing materials for the library collection. Acquisitions is defined as the “the process of selecting, ordering, and receiving materials for library or archival collections by purchase, exchange, or gift, which may include budgeting and negotiating with outside agencies, such as publishers, dealers, and vendors, to obtain resources to meet the needs of the institution’s clientele in the most economical and efficient way”.

Electronic resources have opened up an array of new content acquisition models, ranging from purchase to subscription to demand-driven and various hybrid models. Additionally, these models apply to both book and journal content, in both print and electronic formats. These alternative ways of doing business with publishers, aggregators and other vendors offer a new flexibility, and challenges, to library acquisition and collection development strategies.