Collection Reflection

I'm in charge of ordering the adult graphic novels for my location and some of our eight branches. I took on this part of the collection several years ago, as well as responsibility for ordering nonfiction that falls in the 741.5 call number, which is where our catalogers put all the books on how to draw manga, comics, and graphic novels, as well as things like Peanuts and  Calvin and Hobbes . I "only" have $750 to spend a year at this location (and $100 per branch), so I only place orders twice a year. Your mileage may vary--I realize this is a bigger budget than many libraries probably have. Because we also have a young adult graphic novel collection and a separate collection down in the children's department, I can focus on titles that will be of primary interest to adults. The YA librarian orders many of the most popular superhero titles-- Batman , the infinite varieties of  X-Men , and so on--leaving me blissfully free of that budget drain. What if I'm S...

In catching up on patron requests this week, I realized how often some of the same questions come up over and over again. The process of filling out a request is pretty easy, but you do have to log in with your card number, fill out a form, etc, so it isn't without some effort. I wish there was a way to tell a wide range of people that some requests are unable to be filled before they go through the trouble of making the request. That said, here are some things I am frequently asked by patrons: Why do you have some of a series but not all? Probably the question I am asked most often. The library collection is a not a static thing. Things go missing, get damaged, and get stolen all the time. So, the odds are good that we used to have book 2 of the series, but we don't anymore. I try to discourage people from discarding a series book if the other books in the series are circulating well, or if the author is still writing the series. Yes, most J.R. Ward fans agree that Lover...

So, when I started making notes for the LJ presentation next month, of course I wrote down WAY more than I have time to use in 10 minutes. I think (I hope?) I used the best stuff for the slides, but no reason why we can't discuss the same things here too, right? Of course there isn't. I was thinking about permanence and the digital collection and how we shouldn't think of buying into this format (whatever format we might be using) as an endpoint. Who knows what might happen in the future, right? But this isn't an idea that is unique to downloadable audio/ebooks! How many cassettes (audio AND video) did we have to replace with the next format? Before cassettes, many libraries had records. There was probably some crazy library out there that circulated 8-tracks (oh please, fess up, I'm dying to know who you are!). Publishing companies would love for libraries to believe we're buying this digital format and it will last forever, but we all know that isn't li...

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...

So, I once bought ordered 85 copies of The Sheikh's Virgin Princess. I'm going to blame my fat fingers which were meant to hit 5, but hit the 8 as well on the number pad. And, of course, I was going way too fast, and didn't even notice it until after they were already ordered. Luckily, I caught it in time and we were able to cancel most of the copies. 23 actually shipped and were paid for, which is still considerably more than the 5 copies I intended. Of those 23, 12 are still in the system and circulating. A semi happy ending, but still.....85 copies. If you think that didn't send me into a mini panic attack, you are mistaken. Collection Development is a sometimes a guessing game with new authors, old authors doing new things, finding yourself on the upside or downside of a trend, trying to guesstimate all sorts of things. But sometimes, even without those issues, plain old mistakes happen. Sometimes, you go to fast and hit the wrong numbers. Sometimes, you underestim...

I work at a public library in Springfield, the third largest city in Massachusetts with a population just over 150,000. In Massachusetts, there is a state minimum for number of unique hours a library must be open to qualify for state aid, as well as a minimum percentage of the budget that must be spent on library materials. In recent years, we've undergone several budget cuts that resulted in the loss of staff and the trimming of our materials budget to the bare minimum, one of which occurred as recently as last week. Considering that approximately 50% of my library's budget (which averages a little less than $6M per year) is spent on salary expenditures for the staff at the central library and nine branches, the materials budget has been stretched incredibly thin. Let me throw some numbers out there from the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners website: In FY07, my library's total operating expenditures were $5,676,307, of which $629,391 (11.08%) was spent on...

Despite the fact that the standard "librarian reviews" are available online in a variety of locations (e.g., in Baker & Taylor), I still use paper copies when I'm ordering. Why am I still tied to this physical construct? There's something about a big stack of periodicals that says: "Hey, you. Were you thinking about checking Cute Overload? Maybe you should order some books?" I also appreciate the tactile nature of a magazine (I like to authoritatively check off things I'm ordering with a nice colored pen) and the fact that the reviews are adjacent to the articles, advertisements, and other related material with which they were originally published. Sure, you can read a review out of context, just like you can download one song--but sometimes the album is more cohesive if you take it in all at once. It's also nice to give my eyes a break from the computer screen for part of the day. In every library I've worked in, there have been multiple s...

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...

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 ...

Once upon a time, in the not so distant past, book "selection" was done partially on autopilot. Whenever the new PW, Booklist, Library Journal would come in, one of the clerical staff would go through and put all the titles on a purchase order, and then librarians would assign quantities. Now, of course, titles could be moved off the purchase orders if you decided you really didn't want to buy something, but you can imagine how often that happened, right? I mean, beyond the whole inertia factor, I think most librarians here are of the "more, not less" variety. And, after all, if it was mentioned in one of the journals it must be worthy, right? Kirkus, for some reason, was never accorded the same sort of automatic purchase respect. I wonder why...... Taking out the blockbusters, which we were going to buy regardless of what journal they showed up in, many of the books that we bought this way had very, very poor circ. I think the bigger sin for us, though, wa...