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.
What happens when you inherit a world-renowned collection that needs fundamental reimagining? My time as Performing Arts Librarian at Arizona State University has taught me that transformational collection work requires both patience and urgency—and that the process itself is as important as the outcome.
From Child Drama to Theatre for Youth and Community
When I stepped into my role stewarding what was then called the Child Drama Collection—the world’s largest repository of materials documenting theatre for youth—I quickly realized that both the collection’s scope and its name needed evolution. The archive, established in 1980, had grown to over 3,600 linear feet of materials spanning centuries of performance history. But as I assessed the collection’s strengths and gaps, a troubling pattern emerged: in an estimated 5,000 linear feet of materials, only three people of color were significantly represented.
This discovery aligned with concerns that scholar-practitioners Shavonne Coleman and Meriah Sage have raised about the broader field of theatre. In their recent article, “The Opposite of Absence is to Occupy”1, the authors discuss their early research for the project, “Hidden and Erased Stories in Drama and Theatre for the Young: Exploring Untold Narratives“. Their work, alongside Kristala Smart and Josh Streeter, seeks to document how BIPOC/TYA artists, educators, facilitators, practitioners and audiences in theatre for youth have been systematically excluded from institutional memory. The goal of this national research project is to document unwritten and illuminate hidden history facts and experiences that have been pushed to the margins in order to maintain the status quo.
This work asks a crucial question: “What happens if we don’t uncover hidden histories?”
My collection assessment revealed exactly what happens—entire communities disappear from the historical record, not because they weren’t contributing to the field, but because collecting practices privileged certain voices while marginalizing others.
This discovery became a catalyst for change, but not the kind that happens overnight. Institutional transformation, I learned, operates on a different timeline than individual urgency—but Coleman and Sage’s work demonstrates that this effort extends far beyond any single collection or institution.
Nashville Children’s Theatre Records, Arizona State University.
Alt image description: A group of children and one adults sit in chairs and on the floor, facing the camera in what appears to be an indoor gathering or event, reimagining a storytelling.
Learning to Process—Collections and Change
I got my archival training through volunteer work and graduate school. But the real learning happened on the job. Thanks to mentorship from colleagues like Associate Archivist Elizabeth Dunham, I discovered that processing archival materials takes about eight hours for each linear foot. At that rate, and with current staffing, the processing of our physical collection would take decades.
But the mathematical reality became complicated by a more immediate challenge: my predecessor accepted the task of building the collection over nearly 40 years and agreed to fulfill every request. Her focus was on acquisition and supporting what was then a robust PhD program in Theatre for Youth (which has since changed to one faculty member and no longer offers doctoral degrees). As an MFA graduate rather than a trained librarian or archivist with an MLIS, she lacked formalized training in archival processing and librarianship. This situation unfortunately occurs too often in the field, particularly with specialized collections.
The result?
I’ve been working on decades of technical processing issues that I’m now resolving. Incorrect barcodes. Incomplete records. Materials that need rehousing. Collections that need fundamental reorganization. I love community-centered collecting and reaching more people. But a lot of my daily work is less exciting. I spend time fixing past mistakes: updating catalog records, standardizing folder labels, creating finding aids, and making materials accessible to researchers.
This mundane technical work doesn’t generate headlines or conference presentations, but it’s essential infrastructure for everything else. You can’t build authentic community partnerships when your collections lack organization. You can’t serve researchers well when your catalog records are incomplete. And you can’t advocate for resources when you can’t prove basic professional competency in collection management.
Collection management roles should require MLIS training or similar archival credentials. Making these qualifications optional isn’t enough. Technical skills go beyond just following procedures. They’re about grasping how information architecture impacts access. We must ensure that communities can find and use the materials they trust us with.
Navigating Legacy and Change
One of the most delicate aspects of reimagining an established collection involves stakeholders with deep emotional investments managing their relationships regarding past practices. My predecessor dedicated nearly 40 years to building this collection, and her relationships with donors, faculty, and students fostered a strong sense of institutional loyalty. When I arrived with plans to shift collecting priorities and rename the collection, some community members felt that the changes represented a rejection of that legacy.
I frequently heard the phrase “When Kathy was here…” Descriptions followed about the different ways people managed things. Some well-meaning colleagues called me “the new Kathy.” This left some donors confused or worried about the changes to established practices. Some faculty emeriti, who shaped the collection’s original direction, saw community-centered collecting as a departure from its “true purpose.”
These conversations required careful navigation. I have profound respect for the foundation established by previous stewards; without their decades of work, no collection would exist to reimagine. But I also had to establish that while I honor that legacy, I am not my predecessor.
#Loyalty
The challenge grew as performing arts communities built strong loyalties. They often protect their beloved mentors. Graduate students and alumni may feel that changes to the curriculum or collection focus criticize their education. Some long-time donors worry that others may not value their contributions anymore. This concern arises when collecting priorities change.
I needed to state clearly that when faculty or librarians retire, they no longer make decisions for the institution. Emeritus status brings honor and respect, but not ongoing operational control. Current staff should address current needs and priorities, not cling to past methods.
This doesn’t mean dismissing valuable input or ignoring institutional history. Instead, it means that we distinguish between honoring legacy and allowing it to constrain us. The collection’s strength comes from its evolution, not its stasis.
Learning from Hidden Histories
My work intersects with broader efforts to document marginalized voices in theatre for youth. Hidden and Erased BIPOC Stories in Drama and Theatre for the Young: Exploring Untold Narratives exemplifies the kind of collaborative research needed to address historical gaps. The team wants to uncover and record overlooked historical facts and experiences. Many of these have been pushed aside to keep things the same. This effort mirrors the challenges faced by academic collections.
A cross-sectional approach offers essential lessons for academic libraries. Rather than waiting for traditional donation processes, this project actively seeks out stories through community connections and alternative documentation methods. It acknowledges that significant contributors may not identify with conventional academic labels—they might be storytellers, social workers, or community organizers whose work doesn’t fit neat categorical boundaries.
This perspective has shaped how I approach collection development. Instead of only seeking materials from established theatre organizations, I’m learning to recognize that vital historical documentation might exist in community centers, family collections, or oral traditions that formal archives have overlooked.
Image: MSS-273, Rosa Lee Scott Papers, Arizona State University. Alt image description: Black and white photo of a Black woman standing in profile, thoughtfully resting her hand on her chin—a quiet moment of reflection—wearing a light jacket over a dark top against a plain background.
The “And” That Changes Everything
The collection’s new name—Theatre for Youth and Community—reflects more than a semantic preference. The addition of “and Community” acknowledges that methods and practices previously labeled “for youth” now serve a broader range of audiences. But it also recognizes that youth are often overlooked even in discussions of “community.” This collection intentionally works toward strengthening their sense of belonging and advocacy.
This seemingly small change necessitated extensive conversations with library leadership, faculty stakeholders, and community partners. It demanded research into the field’s evolution and careful consideration of how language shapes collecting priorities. The renaming process taught me that institutional change requires building consensus while maintaining focus on equity and inclusion.
Balancing vision with infrastructure
Academic libraries face constant tension between managing existing resources and adapting to evolving needs. With our collection, this meant simultaneously:
Addressing technical debt: Correcting years of processing inconsistencies, updating incomplete records, and rehousing materials according to current standards.
Processing decades of unprocessed materials using proper archival methods while working within realistic timelines.
Developing new community partnerships to address historical gaps in representation.
Training graduate assistants in both technical skills and community-centered approaches.
Learning from ASU’s Community-Driven Archives Initiative on hosting workshops and oral history events.
The key insight? These aren’t competing priorities—they’re interdependent aspects of responsible stewardship. You can’t build real community relationships without showing basic skills in collection management. You can’t help researchers well if your passion for inclusive collecting lacks strong technical support.
The unsexy work of fixing barcodes and standardizing folder labels might not align with the transformational vision I brought to the role, but it’s what makes that vision possible. Community members need to trust that their materials will receive proper care and remain accessible to future researchers. That trust starts with demonstrating that you can manage what you already have.
Community-Centered Collecting in Practice
Shifting toward community-centered collection development means more than updating mission statements. It requires:
Transparency and shared stewardship. Community members need to understand how they will use and preserve their materials, and they should provide ongoing input into those decisions.
Long-term relationship building. There’s no rush or pressure for donations. Trust develops through consistent engagement and demonstrated commitment to community priorities.
Resource allocation. Meaningful community engagement requires dedicated time and personnel—not good intentions.
Regional networking. Partnering with other institutions helps collection development focus on broader access goals. This way, they can work together instead of competing.
Acknowledging alternative forms of documentation is important. Not all critical work fits traditional archival formats. Community storytelling, oral histories, and unique documentation can capture experiences that formal records often overlook.
Lessons for Academic Libraries
My experience suggests several implications for academic librarians navigating similar collection challenges:
Embrace collaborative learning. Early-career librarians should not hesitate to seek mentorship, and institutions should create environments where questions and mistakes are part of professional development.
Invest in professional development and proper training. Specialized collections require specialized skills. Enthusiasm and subject expertise aren’t substitutes for professional competency in information management.
Address technical debt with transparency. Inherited collection problems don’t disappear—they compound. Building new partnerships while ignoring existing organizational issues creates unsustainable workloads and undermines trust.
Plan for the long term. Real change in collections, especially for diversity and inclusion, needs ongoing dedication. This must go beyond individual roles or funding periods.
Document the process. How we transform collections is as important as what we transform them into. Other institutions can learn from both successes and challenges.
Collaborate with existing projects. Rather than starting from scratch, look for community-led initiatives already doing this work. Projects like Coleman’s “Hidden and Erased” prove how academic institutions can support grassroots documentation efforts without trying to control them.
The Ongoing Work
Over two years into this role, I’m struck by how much I’ve learned and how much work remains. Processing continues alongside community outreach. Relationships develop over time while immediate access needs remain. At the same time, technical corrections occur alongside visionary planning. The collection grows in new directions while I’m still organizing what came before.
This tension isn’t a problem to solve—it’s the nature of the work. Academic libraries support various groups over time. Therefore, to create real change, they must balance short-term maintenance with long-term goals. For example, updating catalog records may seem dull, but it ultimately helps make collections more accessible. Rehousing materials shows the careful care communities need to see before they trust us with their histories.
Unsolicited advice
For ACRL colleagues facing similar challenges, my advice is this: embrace the long game while establishing your professional authority. Institutional change occurs at a gradual pace, yet it does occur. Furthermore, document your process and build authentic relationships. Most importantly, remember, the key question isn’t if you can change everything at once. It’s about whether you’re heading in the right direction. Remember that the key question isn’t whether you can avoid disappointing people who preferred how things used to be—instead, it’s about whether you’re stewarding collections responsibly for current and future communities.
The Theatre for Youth and Community Collection will continue evolving long after my tenure ends. That’s exactly as it should be. Our role as librarians isn’t to perfect collections, but to steward them responsively and responsibly for the communities we serve—including communities we haven’t served well in the past.
What stories are missing from your collections? How can community partnerships change what you collect and how you collect it? We all share the power to document history. But we must create conditions that allow everyone to join in. As Coleman’s project reminds us, the opposite of absence is to occupy—and academic libraries have a responsibility to make space for those who have been systematically excluded from institutional memory.
Questions for Reflection
When you consider collection development and your ties to the institution, ask yourself these questions:
When you assess your collections for gaps, whose voices are missing? How might those absences reflect historical power structures rather than simply acquisition opportunities?
What community-led documentation projects exist in your region? How might your institution support rather than compete with grassroots preservation efforts?
About institutional change:
How do you balance honoring institutional legacy with responding to current community needs? When does the preservation of tradition become resistance to necessary evolution?
What technical debt are you carrying from previous collection management practices? How does that infrastructure work to support or hinder your ability to serve diverse communities?
About professional identity:
How have you built your professional authority after a long-serving predecessor while also honoring their legacy? What strategies help you navigate stakeholder expectations?
How do you share changes in collection priorities with donors and community members?
When implementing equity-focused changes, how do you distinguish between legitimate concerns about process or resources versus resistance rooted in preserving existing power structures? What role might your identity markers (race, gender, age, career stage) play in how stakeholders receive your initiatives?
About the long-term work:
What would success look like for your collection transformation efforts in five years? In twenty years? Moreover, how do you measure progress on work that spans many career cycles?
How are you keeping track of your processes and decisions? Future librarians will need this information to continue the work.
Sources:
Coleman, S., & Sage, M. (2025). The Opposite of Absence is to Occupy. ArtsPraxis, 11(2). ↩︎
The summer, for many academic librarians, brings a lull, and for me that sometimes means that I have the opportunity to travel. Budgets here, as I imagine they are in many institutions, are currently a mess, but I was luckily still able to visit Southeast Asia a few weeks ago. I didn’t do nearly as much purchasing as I would have liked (see the aforementioned budget problems), but I was able to buy a few things and I also met a lot of great people to hopefully collaborate with in the future. So, without further ado, here’s a little bit of what I did on my summer vacation.
Kediri, East Java
My first major stop was Universitas Nusantara PGRI in Kediri, a city in East Java. For the AIFIS-MSU Conference on Indonesian Studies this past June, faculty at the university composed and choregraphed a piece for their students to perform as part of the opening ceremony, drawing on local performing arts traditions. They had a larger festival planned in July, so I, of course, wanted to attend. After I gave a (very embarrassing) speech about the importance of preserving cultural heritage, I relaxed and watched several musical and dance performances presented both by students and by community groups.
History students from the university also took me to see some important historical sites in the area, including Tegowangi Temple, where I met the woman in charge of maintaining the temple. She grew up in the area and it was her father who decided that the temple should be looked after and maintained. Kediri was home to a historically important kingdom in Java and it was fascinating to learn more about this history from the students and to hear what excites them about their studies.
Place Marketing
Everywhere I visited, I also stopped by a tourism information center, or found other ways to pick up place marketing materials for MSU’s collection. This meant everything from wandering through a Jakartan construction site looking for one of many, many malls to visiting an office located inside an Arc de Triomphe lookalike in the middle of Kediri. Collecting place marketing materials is always fun because they’re everywhere but it’s still an adventure hunting them down—a kind of library scavenger hunt.
“Academic” Meetings
Then, of course, there were the more standard library- and academia-focused meetings. I’m hoping to get more involved in collaborating on research with practitioners in Indonesia, either in traditional research collaborations or through other methods such as translating research papers into English so that they can be published for a different kind of audience, so I had several different meetings discussing ideas.
On the library side of things, a highlight was visiting the library of Surakarta’s Grand Mosque. The National Library of Indonesia and the provincial Regional Library have started a program seeking out so-called “hidden” manuscript collections: collections not found in libraries, but instead in private homes or in community institutions such as mosques. I was invited to sit in on a meeting at the mosque to go through their collection and identify which pieces would fit into the scope of the project. I got to see everything from books of tafsir with notes in the margins to student report cards, learned about different kinds of paper and what they signal about time period and preservation, and ferried a lot of archival housings between tables.
When I visit libraries overseas, I try to make note not only of what kinds of materials they have, but also how they can be accessed. If a student comes to me looking for Javanese Qurans, do I know the person they need to contact to gain access? Is there an online catalog? Even better, are there digitized copies available to browse? In the case of the Grand Mosque, there’s as yet only a paper catalog (currently out of print), but there are a large number of manuscripts that have been digitized and made available online.
My other big library meeting was with the Library of Congress field office in Jakarta. The Library of Congress has offices around the world that funnel books back to the US, including to research libraries. I can report that despite everything going on politically in both the US and Indonesia, operations at the field office continue. Shipping costs are rising and there are other unexpected hurdles that come up, but it was heartening to meet with everyone face-to-face and hear how things are going.
Zines
Finally, I planned my itinerary around a zine festival in Jakarta, a city whose zine scene I’ve watched from afar for some time. The festival was held at KONGSI 8, a small studio and café space, but they managed to fit in a good number of vendors as well as a large collection of zines from makers who weren’t present. I had to resist buying everything, and instead focused on political and environmental zines, as well as zines about identity.
Collecting zines for the library helps to provide immediate access to what everyday students, activists, and creators are thinking. The next step, of course, is making sure library users know the zines are available. One thing I’d really like to focus on in the coming year is communicating with students about the library’s zine collection and brainstorming with them ways they can use zines both as sources for their research and as a way of expressing their ideas and findings. But more about that in another post.
What have you been up to this summer? Any interesting projects? Any bright ideas? Are you ready for the fall semester?
Towards the end of fall 2023, the STEM Librarian stepped down from her position at CSU Northridge. Throughout her tenure, she covered liaison duties that spanned across many Science and Engineering departments. I heard about this news during a monthly department meeting. Our department chair requested support and asked us to reach out if interested in taking over the STEM liaison roles. Despite the fact that I have an academic background in the Humanities and Social Sciences, I recognized the urgency of the situation and offered my support. In the spirit of camaraderie, I contacted my chair and volunteered to help. Soon after, I was assigned to be the liaison for the single department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, which includes library instruction and collection development responsibilities.
When I started at CSU Northridge, I was initially assigned to be the Central American & Transborder Studies liaison. Due to my background in Ethnic Studies, particularly Chicana/o Studies and Latina/o Studies, I felt quite comfortable with this assignment. I felt at home as I taught information literacy sessions, facilitated research consultations, and performed my bibliographer duties for the department of Central American & Transborder Studies. It wasn’t until I became the liaison to Chemistry & Biochemistry that I began to feel like I was navigating an uncharted path.
Recently, I had to select publications to update the collection for Chemistry & Biochemistry. Since it was my first time performing my collection development duties for this department, I was out of my depth. As a liaison librarian, I must meet 3 important collection development deadlines throughout the academic school year. Just over a week ago, I met the second deadline and I spent 75% of all available funds. To be frank, this was easier said than done for an early career librarian without a STEM background. For more support, I reached out to several librarians in the Collection Access and Management Services (CAMS) department. Although I was already diving into book reviews and book spotlights offered by professional associations, I realized that I needed more guidance. As a result of my colleagues’ mentorship, I learned about ALMA analytics and I discovered how to search for slips in Gobi. These lessons allowed me to finalize my selections for Chemistry & Biochemistry.
As for library instruction, the fall semester will start tomorrow, so I have not taught any information literary sessions for Chemistry & Biochemistry. However, I already received 3 instruction requests from a professor teaching CHEM 464L – Principles of Biochemistry. To prepare, I have been exploring the already established CHEM 464L LibGuide. So far, I have set my focus on current topics and the American Chemical Society (ACS) citation style. Additionally, I intend to contact the former Science and Engineering Librarian with the hopes that she will be open to sharing her Google Slides, instructional handouts, and/or other resources. My intention is to learn as much as possible to help students locate the proper library resources. While I recognize that I have immersed myself into a completely different academic discipline, I am reassured by own professional experience, particularly my 10-year trajectory as an educator. I am learning to trust the process, so that I may rely on my own skillset, which includes teaching topics like keyword selection, information evaluation, citation practices, and database search mechanics.
As I wrap up this blog post, I would like to encourage other liaison librarians to please reach out if you’ve had a similar experience. What were some of your approaches? How did you become familiarized with your new role? I would definitely appreciate guidance as I continue to dive into science liaison librarianship.
It’s summer, there’s barely anyone here on campus, let alone the library. What does that mean?
WEEDING! (Which has been talked about on ACRLog, of course: example 1 and example 2).
I won’t lie; I love the process of weeding (or deselection). I really enjoy getting to see the thought processes of librarians past, with what books have made it this far and what was purchased when. Additionally, it’s fun to see when a patron clearly had a burst of energy in researching their specific topic when all or many books in that topic have the same return date.
This is the first time that I’ve been able to do so for larger swathes of a collection – I have been focusing on my exercise science and recreation/leisure sections. At Salisbury, the department liaisons are responsible for their subjects. As a student worker in my previous libraries, I was never on the Access Services side; I could grab a book, even use GVSU’s Automated Storage and Retrieval System to get something for a patron, but it wasn’t my day in and day out to be up in the stacks. I think I went into UIUC’s massive Main Stacks maybe 3-4 times total, partly due to the pandemic. (I am a bit saddened by this, as I would’ve loved to just wander.) Collection development and being in the stacks still isn’t a part of my daily routine, but I really love it when it gets to be.
My process has been to get a call number list from our wonderful Collection Management department, which includes all the book’s information, the total number of loans, when it was added, etc. I don’t have any hard and fast rules about what gets to stay and what doesn’t. I am guided by our overarching collection development policy as well as our subject ones, but there are some consistent thoughts while looking through the stats.
Generally, if it hasn’t been checked out in the last twenty years, it’s on the chopping block; but if we only have, say, 4 books on softball, I’m likely going keep them all (as a sidenote, we have 92 books on baseball but 4 on softball, so I know I’m going to do some purchasing come the new budgets!). If it’s historical, though, like the title Great college football coaches of the twenties and thirties, I’m going to most likely keep. If it has something to do with Maryland or Chesapeake Bay, it’s probably going to stay too. I am also checking to see if our other USMAI (University System of Maryland) colleges have the book as well. If we are the only one to have something in our system, I’ll do even more digging to see if, despite the low circulation stats, it’s something we should hold on to. I’m more stringent with exercise science and anything health related, since it’s important that those stay up to date.
I am also checking the books against the Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST). I only do this for books I already decided to weed. As a member, Salisbury University has to retain certain texts in our collection; there are many books that I deemed ready for deselection that have to stay. All of this is done before I ever go up to the stacks to actually take the books off the shelves! I’ve been staring at a computer screen and Excel sheets a lot this week.
Once I’m actually up there in the shelves, I’m making decisions as I go along. There are some books where I ultimately decided not to weed after paging through. Catalog entries are sometimes very bare bones, and especially if it’s an older book, it can be hard to find information online. So the final determination comes when I’m holding the book in my hands. Two books that were on the chopping block stayed because they were signed by the author. Finally, some books are marked with a red “RCL” stamp, which also signals to me that they must be retained. This retention differs from EAST, though I’d need to ask Collection Management for details. If I come across books that are in poor condition, I will also pull them to either be deselected or repaired.
Being in the stacks and gathering the books is undoubtedly my favorite part. That’s where I get to see all the weird covers, illustrations, sun damage… I affectionately caption it all “adventures in weeding.” (As a sidenote, I am definitely not the one who came up with that; many a librarian has posted their weird and wonderful books with that phrase.) Here’s a few:
Can you believe that Mall Walking Madness is one of the books we have to retain? (I suppose it is a bit of an artifact at this point…) The second photo with highlight is pointing out the “Possibilities for PDAs” in a book on physical education and technology. The last trio of photos are all from the same one on playground equipment, and it is all diagrams with little written instruction (and some slightly disturbing illustrations for different sections). Finally, this short video is of a book with some intense sun damage.
What are some of your best “adventures in weeding”?
