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Wood and Hoffmann II
19 Dec 06
Wood and Hoffmann identify five steps that should be considered before implementing a collection policy:
- Surveying user groups
- Reviewing the goals and objectives of the institution of which the library is a part
- Determining the environmental characteristics likely to have an impact on the library collection
- Compiling specifications for the development of the library collection
- Determining current selection requirements
Historically, librarianship (or library science) has been about codifying existing practices. Collections existed long before collection development policies. In part, it seems to me Wood and Hoffmann’s list of considerations is symptomatic of this tendency. Partially, it’s indicative of the reality that any library exists in an already established context. To develop policy for an existing library, one can’t simply start from scratch and imagine the result to be a pure, intellectual, systematic construct. Instead, you have to work with the messy reality of what’s already there. At the same time, it hardly seems worthwhile simply to describe what goes on day-to-day and call it a policy. The target, I think, lies somewhere in between.
The remainder of W&H’s second chapter (Implementing a Policy) discusses a fair amount of advice from various sources, but it boils down to a few salient themes:
- Who will use the policy, and for what purposes?
- How will the policy be accessed, and by whom?
- How will the policy be updated, by whom, and how easily?
The key question, I would argue, is to what extent the policy document serves two central functions: providing direction to staff involved in collection development, and informing the library’s “stakeholders” as to its collection development intentions. (I hate the term stakeholders, but can’t think of a better one.) Stakeholders can be divided into a few main groups: patrons, funding sources, vendors, and staff. It might also be worth considering the extent to which the two central functions might be antithetical.
In my first post on Wood and Hoffmann, I identified four general categories of arguments in favour of libraries having collection development policies: planning, accountability, staff, and information. Partially, what I’m thinking about now is not so much a reduction of those categories to two, but a recognition that specific aspects of a policy may be either internally or externally oriented. Indeed, a policy could be entirely oriented in one or the other direction. My gut feeling is that collection development policies often try to do too much. Does a library benefit from having a comprehensive policy, or is it better to sketch a general framework that outlines the library’s general philosophy?
Posted by pzed on December 19, 2006 at 4.11pm
Categories: collection policies, libraries
