I Have a Budget to Buy Books?!

Like many librarians, I love to read and can happily spend hours in pretty much any bookstore or library. So when I started my position at Vanderbilt, I was excited to explore the shelves in all the libraries on campus, including my library (the education library) and the main library (which has most of the popular reading material). You never know what you might find just wandering up and down the shelves – once in an academic library, I found all the bound scripts for the tv show The West Wing and spent several hours happily reading them when I should have been doing research for a project. All of this to say, I love browsing the shelves and choosing books to buy or check out. What I didn’t know when I started this job is that I would be doing exactly that for the department that I liaise with – or what the similarities and differences would be for buying books for a library versus my own bookshelves.

I have a budget to buy books?!

Starting this position, I didn’t have a lot of experience with library collections. I took Resource Selection and Evaluation in library school (my school’s name for our collection management course), but a lot of the course felt theoretical to me. “Select materials that your patrons will use” – of course, but how? It wasn’t clear to me at the time, but I wasn’t too worried. I wasn’t planning on being a collections librarian. I did get a little hands-on experience with collection development through my Graduate Assistant position at UNC-Chapel Hill, but because our library budget was very limited, we weren’t able to purchase any books. We were only able to sort through physical books donated to the library and decide from those materials which ones we wanted to add to the catalog.

When I started in my current role at Vanderbilt’s Peabody Library, one of the first things I learned was that I have a budget to purchase books and e-books that are relevant for the students and faculty in the department that I liaise with. Having a budget to buy books for the library sounded both like a lot of fun and a significant responsibility. I wasn’t sure where to start. Luckily, one of my colleagues at Peabody Library is an expert in collections, so I scheduled an hour with him during my first few weeks on the job to go over how everything works. I had a lot of questions: what is my budget and how does it work, how do I purchase books, how do I know what books to purchase, should I purchase e-books or print books, and more.

As we logged in to the online ordering system that Vanderbilt Libraries uses, I was overwhelmed. There were thousands of books, each available in multiple different formats, any of which was fair game for me to purchase. My colleague assured me that with time, I would get a good sense of what books would be most relevant for my specific department. In the meantime, he recommended setting up email alerts for newly published, pertinent books – and that the best way to set up those email alerts was by relevant call numbers.

Categories and Call Numbers and Cataloging, Oh My

Of course, I can read call numbers, find a book on a library shelf, and shelve a book in the right place (Shelving Wizard, anyone?). But cataloging was only offered once during my two years in library school, and I couldn’t take the class the one semester that it was being taught. I have friends who can reel off both Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress call numbers and their corresponding topics, but unfortunately that’s not a skill I have. To tackle this, I tried to think through all the steps: to buy relevant books, I needed to set up email alerts by call number; to set up email alerts by call number, I needed to figure out the topics that corresponded with those call numbers; to figure out those topics, I needed to be a lot more familiar with the Library of Congress system – and my liaison department.

By working backwards with this logic, I figured out where I needed to start – and then I worked forwards from there. I have almost the entire academic year to spend my library budget, so I decided to give myself a runway. I took the first couple of months at my job to make notes of books professors asked for and topics that students were researching. Then, in mid-October, I pulled up the list of Library of Congress call numbers and their corresponding topics. Any time my notes overlapped with an LOC topic, I wrote down that LOC call number. Finally, I set up my email alerts based on the LOC numbers I had written down.

Libraries can’t purchase books on Kindle

Finally, for the last couple months, I’ve had emails arriving in my inbox with books that were relevant for my students and faculty members that I could consider buying. The first, and probably the biggest, hurdle is now behind me. There are more steps to the process of actually purchasing a book, but the one that I really want to talk about is e-books versus print books – specifically the difference in cost.

Every time I decide to buy a book, I have to decide whether I want to purchase that book in print or as an e-book. There are pros and cons each way, and I’m starting to understand that balancing those is an intangible part of collection development. For instance, a lot of the students and programs that I support are distance learners. If there’s a book that I think would be particularly useful for those students, buying it in print won’t help them much, because they’re scattered all around the U.S. and internationally. I really need to buy electronic books for them.

The catch is that e-books are more expensive – typically, a lot more expensive.

One of the readings that stuck with me most from library school is a blog post titled “Hold On, eBooks Cost HOW Much? The Inconvenient Truth About Library eCollections.” In the blog post – complete with charts and graphs – the author breaks down exactly how much more expensive e-books are compared with print books. Libraries can’t just buy $1.99 Kindle e-books and then allow their patrons to access them – something that I’ve had to explain to quite a few friends. Because of copyright laws and other restrictions (again, I’m not a collections librarian so I don’t know all the ins and outs), libraries have to buy special library licenses for e-books which can often cost several times the price of the print book.¹ (Just as a note, the blog post I linked to is older, but a google search for “library cost of e-books” yielded many more recent articles.)

The big collections budget I thought I had definitely isn’t going to stretch as far as I thought now that I’ve purchased several e-books with price tags of a few hundred dollars each! It’s one thing to read about it and a totally different thing to see the price tag in my cart. But it’s also a bigger issue than I can solve as an individual, new librarian – right now, I just have to figure out how to spend my budget the best way I can to support my students and faculty.

I still have a lot to learn about collection development and managing the collections for my students and faculty. At some point, I would like to do a survey of faculty (and maybe students too) to find out what they would like to see in our collections and items that we don’t have which they would find useful. I also want to continue getting more familiar with Library of Congress call numbers and investigate whether there are any additional LOC topics I should add to my email alerts. But for my first semester, I feel good about the progress I’ve made in setting up alerts, putting in several book orders, and getting more familiar with the overall system. Next semester, I hope to continue refining my strategies in what I purchase and how I work with faculty to be more strategic in purchasing.

References:

1. Rothschild, J. (2020, September 6). Hold on, eBooks cost HOW much? The inconvenient truth about library eCollections. Smart Bitches Trashy Books. https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2020/09/hold-on-ebooks-cost-how-much-the-inconvenient-truth-about-library-ecollections/