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Johnson, Fundamentals
19 Dec 06
Johnson, Peggy. Fundamentals of Collection Development and Management. Chicago: ALA, 2004.
This would be a great text book for a first collection development course. After five years of doing the job, and at a time when I’m trying to work specifically on a collection development policy document, it might seem a step backwards to read an introductory text, but Johnson’s got some interesting ideas. I’ve only slogged through the first chapter, on the history of selection and its evolution into collection development/management; of course, it’s entirely American in focus, but it is an ALA publication, and hey, I live south of the border. It’s interesting to note that the “landmark event recognizing collection development as a new specialization in librarianship” (14) occurred in 1977. What on earth did libraries do before that?
I’m more interested in the future, really, but to answer my somewhat facetious rhetorical question (and to oversimplify a little), collection development as a specialty came out of selection and acquisition processes that could no longer cope with the size of the information universe. Acquisitions is normally clustered within the broad category of “technical services”: back-room stuff like cataloguing, preservation, invoicing, and so on. As a result, in many libraries collection development is often included on the technical service side. However, there is an obvious public service element to collection development as well, especially in an academic setting where liaison with faculty and students is an expectation of the job. Other “public services” are things like reference, information literacy, and circulation. In my library, collections is considered a public service, and since July 1, 2006, has been part of the same department as reference and information literacy. That’s why I’m interested when Johnson says something like this:
The opening of library catalogs to remote users, along with access to an endless variety and number of files outside library collections and their catalogs, creates a role for librarians as information guides or mediators. Librarians must be prepared and willing to guide users to files, no matter where they are stored, and ready to advise on retrieving them. Librarians have a mission to provide access to information and sources that have been inaccessible and unknown. (22)
I think she’s thinking, here, of various efforts to “tame” the internet: LII or BUBL, for example. Sites like these are great, but there’s limited space for them. Other ideas, like loading up library catalogues with web links, don’t really get it either. And in my experience (again, as an academic librarian) the majority of the electronic resources used by my patrons are behind a subscription wall, and we pay a great deal of money to get them access. So I see other implications for collections librarians, although I’m not sure I’m ready to articulate them. Johnson goes on to say:
Librarians must be sensitive to specialization and to cross-disciplinary initiatives. They need to learn new vocabularies and to become comfortable providing services to a variety of users. Librarians must move toward collaboration across disciplinary divisions within the library and recognize that more and more resources become relevant. (22)
This is a potentially exciting idea, but I think I initially wanted her to be referring to cross-disciplinarity within library areas of specialization, such as (hmm, just randomly) collections, reference, and information literacy. On second reading, I think she’s referring more to interdisciplinarity in academic disciplines, but I think the logic of interdisciplinarity applies within libraries as well.
Posted by pzed on December 19, 2006 at 10.19am
Categories: collection policies, libraries
