Collection Reflection

This post was originally run by Kristi over at Books, Yarn, Ink, and Other Pursuits , but it is relevant to our interests here as well! She recently began working as a library director in western Massachusetts, and has been doing a lot of learning on the job. ________ Now that I have been here a year, I am starting to work on filling the holes in my knowledge about the collection. Over the last year I did accomplish some massive weeding projects throughout nonfiction, VHS, and books on cassette. We had some heavy-duty shelf sitters and overcrowded subject areas. The previous director loved nonfiction, but I have always been a fiction buyer and that was where I focused my efforts when I began working with the collection. Mysteries are the most popular genre here, but they still need to be weeded from time to time. I also broke out science fiction and fantasy into its own area. One thing I have enjoyed bringing to the library is more displays. We are a small library, but I have a b...

Today's guest post comes to us from that rare breed (around here): an academic librarian. ____ This may be the understatement of the month (and in the running for understatement of the year), but collection development works a little differently at college and university libraries than it does at public libraries. In some ways, the library where I work has a foot in both camps, since we’re semi-rural and miles away from the nearest public library. This dichotomy is especially obvious when you examine one part of the Hiram College Library I manage: the children’s literature collection. Being in charge of our kid lit section presents a lot of challenges, but the biggest one is that the collection has to serve multiple masters. Master #1: It needs to be appealing to school-aged children. There’s been a lot of faculty turnover recently – due to retirement, mostly – so quite a few of our professors have young families. Master #2: It needs to be appealing to our students...

Here at Collection Reflection, we're aware that we spend a lot of time talking about ebooks and weeding and EBOOKS , and we're going to start featuring some guest posts on topics outside of our immediate realm of expertise. One of these days, we might actually find someone to talk about something other than public libraries! Today's post comes from one of Robin's colleagues on the topic of collection development and audio CDs and DVDs. -- Hey Chicken Little, the sky is still up there. I mean, that acorn that fell on your head has fallen down, but there’s still plenty of sky. As a music and film librarian, I get asked almost daily about “when are we going to stop carrying discs?” My answer is always, “when people stop checking them out.” Which I’m guessing will be for a while, since my circulation numbers are still healthy and iTunes is over a decade old. Let’s face it, we only got rid of our VHS collection last year--and the few that could still play were still g...