Collection Reflection

At my library, there are nonfiction sections under my purview that are, to put it kindly, overly well-stocked. Unfortunately, many of the books in these sections are at least twenty years old and are not being checked out by patrons. I don't have any good "before" pictures, but will say that unfortunately the shelves were full to the point where bookends were rendered unnecessary. Way, way worse than the "before" pictures in my denewing post . A little while ago, I got fed up with the condition of the martial arts books (wildly out of order as well as overflowing) and decided to take action. I knew that the books in the sections adjacent to martial arts in the 790s were full of weeding candidates, so rather than generate a list and pull specific titles, I just started pulling off a shelf of books at a time to analyze them, put them in the correct order, and weed weed WEED. Advantages: Being able to see a selection of the library's holdings for a part...

At ALA last week, I participated in a panel called "The Great Non-Fiction Readalike: If You Like This, You'll LOVE That," which featured readalike recommendations in different subject areas based on carefully chosen "touchstone" books. What does reader's advisory have to do with collection development? Good collection development requires a librarian to look ahead in the publication schedule and figure out what books patrons will need and want, based on the library's collection policies, patron requests, past demand, and intuition. Reader's advisory uses many of the same skills to match up patrons and books; the two processes are part of the same continuum of collection management and customer service. Ideally, patrons should end up checking out books they want to read and know that they can come back to the library for similar books. What we were trying to address with the panel was a perception among librarians that it is somehow more difficult...

I was denewing books in the 800s recently, which gives me the opportunity to see how books on the "New" shelf have circulated in the 10-12 months between when they're processed and when they're put in the general collection. These books are featured in a very public area and theoretically have a greater chance of being noticed by patrons and checked out. I've been aware for a while now that books of poetry, while dear to my heart, don't enjoy much popularity at my library, even though they are featured on displays (as for National Poetry Month) and given the same time as other books in the New section. Most of the poetry collections I denewed the other day had circulated, but sometimes as little as one time. Is one circulation a victory? If a book costs a certain amount (after a library discount), and then we add the cost of paying people to process and shelve it, does one circulation make its purchase worthwhile? At what point does the balance swing in fa...

Unless you work in a small library, the chances are good that more than one person selects the nonfiction. This is usually a good thing, because the collection benefits from the different perspectives that selectors bring to their work. It can be a problem when selectors pay less attention to one area than another (especially in terms of weeding and upkeep) or when the selector doesn't know much about the area they're responsible for, both in terms of subject matter and how that part of the collection is used by patrons. Public librarians are supposed to be generalists, but ideally they would order books in subject areas that they were moderately familiar with. However, there are more subject areas than there are librarians, so inevitably there is going to be a situation where librarians are ordering books on topics in which they have zero personal investment. When I first started working at my library, my department head put me in charge of the 800-829 Dewey range (American ...