Collection Reflection

Following my own advice from yesterday's  post on collection maintenance , I checked in and organized all the young adult graphic novels (with the blessing of the YA librarian). Leaving aside the manga for another day, I estimate that we have over 400 YA graphic novels (on the shelf). Upon checking them in, I found: 19 items marked "missing" 3 items marked "lost" 4 items with holds 2 items with notes/cataloging problems 2 graphic novels from the adult collection 1 YA paperback 1 item marked "display" I also pulled out several items to potentially move to another part of the library (e.g., a Garfield collection that could go live with the other Garfield collections). The process took less than three hours, for which I was also on desk. Right after I finish these tasks, I always have a strong urge to hover protectively near the section and put things away as soon as people use them, but I also know (in my rational moments) that a messy colle...

So, you've ordered the books, and they're on the shelves! And you weed them occasionally. Maybe you even weed them on a set schedule, instead of when the shelves are overflowing and the pages start pleading with you to do something about them! Aside from weeding, here are some steps I recommend doing as frequently as possible to make sure that your collection looks presentable and is represented accurately in the catalog. As always, I recommend approaching your collection in manageable chunks, which for this exercise should be 1,000 items or less. If you're low on time, run a list of the items in one part of the collection that have "trouble" or out of the ordinary statuses: missing lost or lost and paid billed claims returned in process repair in transit Go through (or send a minion, if you are lucky enough to have minions) and look for these trouble items. You'd be surprised how many of these items are actually sitting on the shelf where they...

If you are responsible for collection development in just about any size or kind of library, the chances are good that there's been a recent push to reduce the size of your print reference collection.* Print reference materials are, to use a regional expression, wicked expensive. They are also being used less and less as librarians turn to databases and patrons turn to the immediate gratification of the internet. As budgets decline and libraries look to use their space in new and creative ways, physical reference collections are obvious targets for heavy weeding. Here at my library, we are reducing our reference collection by 50%. At our branches, reference collections will be cut by 75% . . . this time around. So where do you start when you are lucky enough to get the assignment to chop chop chop? Before You Begin Get a firm idea of how much the administration wants to reduce the reference collection. Survey the collection and determine how much you're going to have to weed...

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...

Patron: "Do you have any GED books?" Librarian: "Uh, mayyyyybe, let me check. Sorry, not right now. Can I put one on hold for you?" Replace "GED" with books on witchcraft or sex; titles by Stephen King or Sister Souljah's  The Coldest Winter   Ever ; memoirs like A Child Called "It " ; almost any popular DVD you can name, especially horror films; rock and rap CDs . . . this interaction plays itself out with depressing regularity. A quick check of the catalog shows that my library (just this building, not any of the branches or the extensive network we belong to) has purchased 26 copies of The Coldest Winter Ever , all but three of which have disappeared from the collection. They've been stolen, lost, or taken home and never returned. Each time we purchase one of these items new (in paperback) and process it for circulation to the public, the cost is around $8.00, meaning that we've spent over $200 just to keep one book on the shelf...

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 ...

A quick peek into some digital book numbers from Robin's ( @Tuphlos ) collection at  IMPCL : Some end of the year Overdrive statistics: Overall checkouts (audio and ebook) up 143% in 2011 over 2010. Ebook checkouts were up 470% in 2011 over 2010. Those numbers are without Simon & Schuster, without Macmillan, and without buying new HarperCollins items since March 2010. Audiobook checkouts were up 35% in 2011 over 2010. Overall holds on items went up 151% in 2011 over 2010. Ebook holds, specifically, were up 558%. Current Overdrive collection size: 41,084 titles (11,925 audio, 29,159 ebook).

I've been weeding the fiction paperbacks in my collection. Part of this includes looking for missing items so that I can get a better picture of what is actually on the shelf and what might need to be replaced. Yesterday, I generated a list of missing books for the Science Fiction and Fantasy paperbacks (a collection with 1,000 items). There were 131 books on my list, which included Claims Returned items as well as those In Transit--you'd be surprised how many items have been in transit for years, at which point they're effectively gone from the collection--as well as In Process and Missing items. I found 30 of the missing books on the shelf where they were supposed to be, which was a relief because it means that I don't have to worry about reordering any of them, but also a cause for concern because there aren't that many books in the SF/F collection, and somehow the people pulling holds aren't finding them on the shelf. That left 101 books still missing. M...

A while ago, I started a project to relieve some of the pressure on the mass market paperback shelves by identifying potential candidates for weeding. I found some surprising results, primarily having to do with what books were actually on the shelves. Here is a description of my work with the Fiction paperbacks--those items not classified Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Urban Fiction, Mystery, Horror, Nonfiction, or Western. This catch-all section includes thrillers, literary fiction, classics, Men's Adventure, "chick lit," books featuring African-American characters that aren't cataloged in either the Romance or Urban Fiction sections, and so on. Some of the big names are Dan Brown, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Fern Michaels, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, and Danielle Steel. Almost all of the Tall Premium editions that we own can be found there, making my life difficult. I ran a report on the entire paperback collection to generate the statistics I would need (s...

In an earlier post , I suggested that perhaps writing about my intention to weed some parts of the library's collection would force me into action, and I am pleased to report that it has finally done so! The good news is that I was able to weed some items that were no longer being used by my library's service population, making room for new books that I've been ordering in the normal course of collection development. The bad news is that it took me more than two hours to find fewer than 50 books that I thought might be weedable and remove some of them from the collection. Considering that I only got through a few shelves (of the hundreds that await my careful attention in the 800-830 range), this is somewhat depressing. My goal was to evaluate and discard a manageable chunk of books. The steps were as follows: 1. Using my most recent export of statistics for the 12,000 books in that part of the collection, I created a subset of books with zero circulations in the past 1...

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...

As a follow-up to my post about statistics last week, I thought I would take a closer look at one of my nonfiction sections to demonstrate the kind of information that a report can yield. The Dewey range from 800 through 829 was my first assignment at this library; it covers American and English literature (poetry, essays, speeches, criticism, how-to, humor, drama). It's a grab-bag of exciting treasures, including Chaucer, guides to writing your first screenplay, the collected poems of Maya Angelou, collections of erotica, Dave Barry, Shakespeare, works about (but not by) Jane Austen, and Beowulf . At my library, this part of the collection includes nearly 12,000 items, and they are all under my jurisdiction. I was originally assigned collection development of this section because of my Master's degree in English literature, which at least provided me with some background in the area. Over the years, I've gotten familiar with the collection and what's popular. And, I c...

As usual, I need to weed my parts of the nonfiction collection. I could weed based on condition, which would allow me to clear a little space by pulling books off the shelf that clearly shouldn't be there because they're falling apart, or hideously ugly, or both. But what I really need is to make enough space on the shelves for the new books I've been buying over the past (cough) undisclosed period of time since I last really weeded, which means that I have to get serious. For that, I want a report. I suspect that I care about statistics more than a lot of my colleagues. We do use statistics regularly during the course of our jobs; as reference librarians, we keep a daily record of our interactions with patrons, rather than recording stats once a month or once a year and extrapolating. Even so, I don't think many of my co-workers run reports as regularly as I do or are as familiar with the reporting software. Does this make me a stat-crazed librarian? I'm ...

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...