Collection Reflection

Can we talk, for a minute, about things that aren't books? Don't get me wrong, I love books. I do. I always have. And, honestly, I can't even imagine that a day will come when I will disavow them. Not even for a million dollars. Not even for ten mill.....well, let's not go quite THAT far. But, the point remains, I love books so this is not even close to an anti-book screed. And, I understand that books and literacy are, and have been, the cornerstone of libraries. That's wonderful. Encouraging literacy, and a love of reading, is a fantastic thing to be associated with your organization/profession. I can't think of many people who would argue against these things, and it makes for wonderful, heart warming stories to share with people who hold the purse strings. But, libraries have been circulating things OTHER than books for a long time. In fact, I don't know that I can remember a time when libraries only had books. Even the tiny library in my hometown...

Two years ago, I wrote a post on taking over collection development for the Young Adult video game collection at my library. A few things have changed since then, and some questions emerged which I thought it might be helpful to answer here. In the last year, I've been able to grow the video game collection at this location (kept behind the desk for security reasons) to a modest number of games. This means that when people come in looking for games I at least have something  to show them to confirm that we do order games. Sometimes managing a collection that's almost always circulating--and therefore intangible--is hard to market to patrons. I periodically remind my co-workers that we do have video games in the collection, and I keep my ears open when patrons are at the circulation desk. There's been more than one occasion that I've sprinted over there to let patrons know what we have and guide them through the process of putting games at other locations on hold. T...

Last year, I volunteered to take over ordering the young adult video games for my library. Unlike the rest of my collection development duties, which are focused on materials at the central library (we also have nine branches), the games are a citywide collection. Although they are all located at one branch for security reasons--they kept wandering off when they were stored here--they can be requested by patrons anywhere in the region. 1 I've done a couple of orders over the past year or so since I became responsible for this area, but hadn't really taken a close look at the numbers until recently. I ran a report (of course) and tried to break down what I was seeing in ways that would be useful for my collection decisions going forward. This is also the only non-print collection that I am responsible for, and boy are the numbers different from what I'm used to seeing, especially in comparison with the nonfiction collection! The most prominent statistic was probably the ...