Collection Reflection

This post is part of the larger Library Day in the Life project--I thought it would be fun for Collection Reflection to participate. Because I work with the public, I never actually get to spend an entire day doing collection development, so I'm going to describe the bits and pieces that got done over the course of this week in the midst of desk time, class preparation and teaching, and whatnot. My library's collection budget has been cut to the state minimum requirement (as selectors, we haven't yet been told how this will play out, only that it's very bad) and has not yet been finalized. Therefore, we have been preparing carts for the last month or two without knowing when the items will be ordered. What this means is that books I have selected, some of which have subsequently appeared on bestseller lists, are not yet available to patrons. However, the selection process--like the show--must go on. I am hoping that the books I've selected will still be in dema...

I work at a public library in Springfield, the third largest city in Massachusetts with a population just over 150,000. In Massachusetts, there is a state minimum for number of unique hours a library must be open to qualify for state aid, as well as a minimum percentage of the budget that must be spent on library materials. In recent years, we've undergone several budget cuts that resulted in the loss of staff and the trimming of our materials budget to the bare minimum, one of which occurred as recently as last week. Considering that approximately 50% of my library's budget (which averages a little less than $6M per year) is spent on salary expenditures for the staff at the central library and nine branches, the materials budget has been stretched incredibly thin. Let me throw some numbers out there from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners website: In FY07, my library's total operating expenditures were $5,676,307, of which $629,391 (11.08%) was spent on...