Welcome back to Season Seven of Linking Our Libraries!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and our members are all types of libraries and their staff.

Today’s episode is part of our series on Library Basics. We are working through some of the skills people need in every library. Not everyone is going to school for a Master’s degree in Library Science, and that’s fine. We want to be sure everyone has the skills to be comfortable in a library and to be successful for the community you are serving.

This week we are talking about collection development. Libraries are known for their books and the neat things we can share with our communities. But this does not mean buying just anything at all, or only the things we like. It means creating a collection of materials that meet the needs of the community – the things they want and the things that will be useful and helpful to them even if they don’t know it yet. 

The Content:

It will make your library work easier if you have all of this written down. Create a written policy. It helps you to focus on the parts that are important, and to have something nice to show people when they want to know why you aren’t buying something, or why you don’t want something they want to donate. So write up a collection development policy, work with administration and stakeholders to be sure you aren’t forgetting anything.  

There are two basic parts to a good collection development policy: acquisitions and weeding.  You want to buy good new things, and that is always fun. It’s the part people think of when they think about libraries and materials. And you need to treat your collection like a garden: you have to weed out the things that aren’t working, that are ripped and moldy, or just generally needing to be removed. We will walk through both of these parts today, so you feel confident in your skills!

So, the first part is acquisitions. That sounds easy enough, but what does your library collect? You don’t collect everything – it’s impossible and impractical. It may seem obvious what you collect. If you are in a K-3 school, it is unlikely that you are collecting particle physics textbooks, and a lot more likely that you have a strong collection of books about colors, numbers, and other important fundamental skills. So think about what you want to do, what community groups you are serving, and what kinds of information needs they have. 

Collections do not need to be just books. You should add in some digital materials, of course. As we record this, we are in the midst of the COVID pandemic, so the more online material we can provide to our communities, the better we are able to serve them. Go ahead and link to Youtube videos, to databases, to PBS and Commonsense media classes, to the Library of Congress education material – to all kinds of other things that might be useful to people. You can feel free to pay a lot of money for material, or to use free – but good – resources. 

And it is also good to add in some other materials. Look at your community to see what would help them, what would be fun, or interesting. How about fishing poles? Stuffed animals? Telescopes? Museum passes? Tinker toys? All of these are possible, and could be good for your library collection. Do you have a maker space? Again, you can spend lots of money to get all kinds of fancy things, or you can put out some printed coloring pages with crayons and colored pencils, construction paper and glue, and maybe some glitter. Get as fancy as you like, or go as low key as you want.

Figuring out what to buy is an important part of the process here. And this is deceptively hard. Yes, buy nice things, buy things you know you like, buy things you’ve heard about from best sellers lists. All good sources and ideas. But you also want to remember that your own perspective is limited. It’s important to reach out beyond your own ideas, preferences, and book ideas. If we were buying books based on our own preferences, the library would be pretty filled with YA fantasy. We would be thrilled; not everyone would love it though, and it would not fit the needs of the whole community.

For a more realistic example, browse the collection of your local public library. Are the shelves filled with crafting, gardening, and child-raising books? If so, that’s not uncommon, and reflects the preferences of the large percentage of middle aged white women who work in libraries. Of course, these are lovely books and have their admirers. But, where are the books about trucks? Football?Where are the books by African American authors? Where are the books in Spanish and other languages? Where are the Asian fairy tales? Where are the history books written by Indegenous people? All of these are important to a good collection. 

They are not just nice ideas, these books are just as important as collecting yet another James Patterson book. It is important that patrons can all see themselves reflected in the collection. And it is also important that patrons can use fiction, as well as nonfiction, to learn about people who are not like themselves, to learn new ideas, and to discover perspectives they have not considered. So be deliberate in reaching out to books that are not your usual, authors you do not know, books that aren’t hitting the best sellers list. 

Don’t discount patron recommendations and requests in book buying! A lot of libraries have simple rules set up for this process: they buy a book the second time it’s requested, or something similar. Even if you never end up buying a specific book, it’s important to know what kinds of books your community members want. At the end of this all, you are there to serve their needs, and bringing in good material is a big part of that.

The next step in the buying process is figuring out where to buy materials, and how to do that. Where to buy things might be dictated by your library procedures already, or maybe by your parent organization. If that is the case, fine – one less problem to solve. Look around to see if you can nab some bargains. If you have money, it’s really nice to buy books from big publishers that are already processed and come with cataloging records. And if you are most of the rest of us, you want to balance the cost of the books themselves with the costs of getting them ready to enter your collection. Processing and cataloging are never free; you pay in money or in staff time (which is also money – just from a different account). 

If you are working with a book vendor, be sure they know your budget and what you can spend. The good ones will not let you go over that amount, because they want you back again later. Go ahead and buy books from used bookstores and garage sales – we’ve seen a lot of school libraries working to stretch their $300 annual book budget by doing this. Sure, it’s a shame that not everyone has enough money, but getting in the good material is more important than the source. We are not judging your process – we want your library to end up with good books.

A surprising number of people believe that publishers just give books to libraries. (We’re going to give you a moment to stop laughing hysterically, and to wipe the tears from your eyes over that very funny idea.) That does not happen. So work with your principal on budget. Talk to your school board if you can. Put in requests to the PTA or other parent’s group. Sign up for Donors Choose, and crowdfund some materials for your library. It would be lovely if you had money to spend on whatever you wanted and needed, but there are almost no libraries where that is the case. You have to make decisions, and you may have to do some hustling around to find money. Be prepared to get in there and work for the money, so you can turn it into great things for your community!

Now you have some great things. Put them on the shelf, do some adversisting, circulate them for months and years. But, maybe they aren’t so great anymore. Maybe your astronomy books talk about how great it is that Pluto is a planet, or – worse yet – that someday people will make it to the moon. You might have the very unpleasant, but not uncommon, experience of opening up a storage container of books – and find they have become covered in mold. And there are always going to be DVDs returned that have scratches, books the dog has bitten, and items with  unidentified stains that you really don’t want to explore too closely. All of these things need to go, to make your collection stronger. 

But you have loved this stuff! You bought it all so carefully! It can be hard to weed, but it is important. So where do you start in weeding? Like almost everything in libraries, someone else has set up some procedures. All you need to do is to follow them!

It’s pretty easy to just use the acronym MUSTIE to help you make good decisions:“MUSTIE is an easily remembered acronym for six negative factors that frequently ruin a book’s usefulness and mark it for weeding:

• M = Misleading (and/or factually inaccurate)
• U  = Ugly (worn and beyond mending or rebinding)
• S  = Superseded (by a truly new edition or by a much better book on the subject)
• T  = Trivial (of no discernible literary or scientific merit)
•  I = Irrelevant to the needs and interests of your community
• E = The material may be obtained expeditiously Elsewhere through interlibrary loan or reciprocal borrowing.

Then you can refine the books based on the CREW guidelines, which are broken into Dewey classifications. We link to one breakdown in our show notes, but you can easily google for some great material on this subject. Here are some examples:

• 004 (Computers) Works on computers are seldom useful after three years. Works on microcomputers and software have an even shorter life span, but may be kept on hand longer if there is strong community demand.
• 300 (Social Sciences) See that controversial issues are represented from all viewpoints and that information is current, accurate, and fair.
•  310 (General Statistics) Almanacs are seldom of much use after two years; add one, discard one every year, to keep only last three years in the collection. If possible, keep one copy in reference and one in the circulating collection for any year. Otherwise, copies from past years may be transferred from reference to circulating when superseded by new editions. 
• 640 (Home Economics) Be strict with old sewing and grooming materials in which styles change rapidly. Keep cookbooks unless little used; replace worn popular titles.

This was a fast look at collection development. But it’s such an important task in your library, you don’t want to just do this without thinking it through. Talk to people, get ideas from all kinds of sources, write it down, and then see how it goes. A perfect collection development strategy would leave your shelves entirely empty, because everything went home. While that’s not too likely, remember that the point is to get things moving out of the library, not to horde them.

Books Read

Now, let’s get to the part of every episode that we love: sharing a book we are reading. We will link to these books on our shownotes pages, and the link will take you to Amazon. You probably know this, but when you click one of our links and then buy anything at all from Amazon, they give us a small percentage of their profits. That support really helps us, and although it’s anonymous so we won’t know it was you – we appreciate you taking the time to help us!

• Stay Gold, Toby McSmith
• The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, by Andrew Sean Greer

Conclusion:

This was a quick overview of the foundations of collection development. We hope you feel like you are part of the larger community! Here are a few takeaways for you:

• Write down your collection development procedure and policies. It does not have to be long and complex, just something you can refer to as needed.
• Acquisitions are usually fun. Buy widely, across all kinds of topics and interests. Be very deliberate in not just choosing things you like or know.
• Weed your collection. Don’t let it get choked out by old, junky, out of date books that need to be discarded. Keep it in good shape.

Thanks for spending time with us today. It is always great to have this time to chat with you about libraries and the skills we need to be successful. Come back next week, because we have more information to share about libraries! This is just the beginning, and there are so many other great things to share!