Library lore includes a cautionary tale of a few users in a patron-driven acquisitions pilot who spent a large part of the library budget on ebooks about bananas. This story and others like it have been used to perpetuate the argument that patron-driven acquisition will inevitably result in collections that don’t appeal to a broad audience or are otherwise undesirable. The authors apply post-acquisition holdings and multi-year usage data to test the hypothesis that patron-selected versus library-selected collections have different usage and subject profiles.

The authors tested the proposition that the ubiquity of HeinOnline in law libraries would alter law review citation patterns. Has HeinOnline’s provision of the full runs of law reviews in full text led to more citations to older materials? This article reports the results of the study they undertook to test this theory.

In 2004, Lesniaski revised White’s Brief Test methodology for smaller academic libraries that lack sufficient subject specialist librarians to perform the brief tests as originally proposed byWhite. As a part of regular collection development, Cowles Library implemented Lesniaski’s Brief Tests on the print monograph collection. While primarily a review of Lesniaski’s methodology, this article also discusses how the Brief Tests were used for improved collection evaluation and maintenance.