Collection Reflection

One of the things I would like us to feature here is accounts of how librarians actually do the work of collection development, which is why I wrote last week about how to tackle new-to-you nonfiction areas . Please contact me if you'd like to share a story about how you order materials for your library, and we will post it here. I order books for a large public library in western Massachusetts, and one of my favorite collection areas is adult (mass-market) paperbacks. Pending our looming budget cuts, I get to spend about $175 a month, which means we have quite a large collection for western MA--even though I only purchase 30-40 books per order. My tight budget means that I try to be very careful about what I order; a book that won't circulate is a waste of my time and the library's money. I am licensed to buy anything with a list price under $10, and I use Ingram to do my ordering. I order for the central library and another selector orders paperbacks for our nine bran...

Aren't you going to thank me? I'm sure there's a post to be written about self-published and local authors who donate their books to the collection and then try to micro-manage them, but I don't get a lot of those, so I'll leave that to the experts. What I want to talk about today is the run-of-the mill box or paper bag of donations. What usually happens at my library is that someone calls up in advance: Patron: "I have/my daughter/my husband has a huge HUGE stack of books and I want to get rid of them." Librarian, nervous about potential overflow and difficulty of getting them in from the parking lot: "How many, can you guess?" Patron: "Like TWO whole boxes!!!" Librarian, relieved: "Sure, we can probably manage that." Patron: "And is there also somewhere I can sell my 1978 encyclopedia?" Librarian: *sigh* The corollary to this interchange is the Will You Appraise My Books for Me call, but let's not st...

How many times has a librarian responsible for ordering materials come across a good-looking review in one of the mainstream publications and put it in the cart, only to remove it when he or she realized that it was book four of an ongoing series and the library didn't own the first three books? Hopefully more times than the librarian kept in in the cart and later realized that volume four was on the shelf and the library still didn't own the first three books. Both of these scenarios are plausible; libraries end up with partial series all the time for a variety of reasons. Let's say that the first volume of a series was "disappeared" by a patron and no one realized this was the case when the time came to order volume three. Or perhaps the librarian ordered a book without realizing it wasn't a stand-alone, and therefore didn't fill the necessary holes. Is there anything sadder than a book two on the shelf with absolutely no sign of a book one? It's ...