A Decision Support System for Managing Demand-Driven Collection Development in University Digital Libraries

In recent years, academic digital libraries have become a very important source of information. Academic digital libraries provide a rich collection in order to satisfy user need for information. The augmentation of user population and the volume of new publications causes many challenges to librarians in the collection development process and determining user needs of information is the fundamental challenge that librarians face. This article presents a demand-driven collection development decision support system based on the PROMETHEE II method. The DSS supports the librarians to make decisions in the collection development process to provide a rich collection that meets the users' needs. The DSS evaluates and determines a set of electronic resources for purchase, subscription, contract reviewing or cancelation. The decision support system extracts users' queries from log files to determine user preferences. Then, the revised Simos' procedure is used to derive the criteria weights. Finally, the authors applied the PROMETHEE II method to evaluate and rank the electronic resources.