Collection Management: A Concise Introduction

2006

Introduction

Looking up the word ‘library’ in a general dictionary, even one published quite recently, is very likely to provide a range of definitions similar to what is found in the fourth edition of The Macquarie dictionary:

1. a place set apart to contain books and other literary material for reading, study, or reference, as a room, set of rooms, or building where books may be read or borrowed

2. a lending library or a public library

3. a collection of manuscripts, publications, and other materials for reading, study, or reference

4. a series of books of similar character, or alike in size, binding, etc., issued by a single publishing house

5. a collection of films, records, music, etc.

6. Computers an organised collection of programs or routines suitable for a particular model of computer (2005, p.823, formatting added).

Dictionaries, of course, are the work of people whose profession is lexicography, not library science, and it would be unreasonable to expect their concise definitions to be precisely what the professionally aware librarian would most like to see. For many years it has been fundamental to the thinking of librarians that a library is not primarily a matter of bricks and mortar, or even of print and other materials capable of storing data. Their emphasis has been on the library as a group of people – professional, para-professional and support staff – and on the repertoire of services provided to clients of the library by those people, making use of buildings, books, films, records and other resources. In the last twenty years, the picture has been increasingly modified to place less emphasis on the role in service provision of buildings and more tangible media like print and film, and to stress instead the providing of resources and services electronically, to clients who might rarely or never visit the bricks and mortar library building. But services, the people served and the people providing the services have remained central to how librarians regard the ‘library’.

Yet we should not dismiss entirely the definitions of the lexicographers, with their focus on places and collections. A central tenet of modern lexicography is that compilers of dictionaries have an obligation to define words in a way which reflects how they are actually used, rather than how guardians of the language or other interested parties think they should be used, and undoubtedly many people do still think of libraries as rooms or buildings, or as collections of materials such as books, films, and so on. Perhaps more important, it remains the case, even in an increasingly digital era, that a vital element in any library is its collection. This is true even if the library possesses few or no materials printed on paper or on film. As will emerge more clearly in the chapters which follow, resources held or made available in digital form are as much a part of a library’s collection as materials printed on paper, even if their presence in the library is intangible.

While for many of us the words ‘library’ and ‘collection’ evoke images of public libraries, academic libraries or other institutions maintained by people with formal library science qualifications, the words are also used to refer to more informal assemblages of books, films, and so on. There would be nothing especially unusual about my referring to the books and periodicals surrounding me in my home as my ‘home library’, or about references to my private ‘collection’ of books or my ‘collection’ of compact discs or videocassettes. But such assemblages of materials brought together and maintained by individuals and households are usually rather random affairs created over the years from gifts, purchases needed at one stage in life or other for work or study and a certain amount of impulse buying. That they are of such a nature is not a criticism. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of such collections is precisely the imprint on them of the changing and developing tastes of an individual or small group, and the element of serendipity they allow.

It is not such libraries and such collections that will concern us here. Public libraries, libraries in educational institutions, and special libraries managed by trained librarians to serve the needs of organisations and corporations in the governmental and private sectors do indeed sometimes contain surprising things, but their purpose is to supply the needs and wants of clients, not of those who create and maintain the library. It has been generally recognised since ancient times that those who collect for such libraries, and in doing so spend money provided by others, have an obligation to the clients and cannot simply consult their own whims in deciding what should be in the collection. The collection that is the product of their work should not have a pronounced random or serendipitous quality, but should be focused on client wants and needs. The focus in the following pages will be on the responsibilities and opportunities that confront those whose duty it is to look after collections in formally constituted libraries and manage them in an efficient and effective manner.

The layperson’s immediate answer to the question ‘What kind of material is contained in library collections?’ would still today probably be ‘Books’. But a little reflection will suggest that this is not an entirely adequate response. Many other kinds of material are held in libraries and so make up its collection. Special libraries serving the needs of private companies or government departments are very likely to have far more issues of trade, professional and academic journals than they have printed books, and in other libraries (including public libraries) recorded music and other sound on discs or tapes form an important part of the collection. Libraries also collect films in various formats, kits and games, and even items more usually associated with museums and art galleries which may have been given to them as gifts or deliberately sought because of their association with authors strongly represented in the collection of print materials.

Increasingly in recent years, however, libraries have turned their attention to digital resources. Some digital resources resemble music discs or videocassettes in that it is possible to bring into the library a physical object such as a computer disc or CD-ROM which contains the data that makes the resource, although special equipment – a computer in the case of digital resources – is required if anyone is to have access to the data. Other digital resources have a less tangible presence in the library: they are available when and if required using the links to data located on distant computers made possible by the internet. In practice, the distinction between the two types of digital resources may blur, at least from the point of view of the clients of the library, since the library may network the digital resources it has acquired in a physical format, and the same computer terminal may be used to access the contents of a CD-ROM a few metres away, or a database made accessible through the internet which is in fact on a computer half a world away.

It is a basic tenet of this book that a library’s collection consists both of traditional materials (mainly in print form in most libraries) and of its digital resources (including those which are present only in a ‘virtual’ sense, through being available when and if required via the internet). In the following pages it will be suggested that digital resources are as much in need of collection management as print ones, though they present different challenges – including some that the library profession is still learning how best to confront.

The field of library collection management is not one that has been neglected. On the contrary, an enormous amount has been published about it, particularly in the last thirty or forty years, and it continues to produce an almost overwhelming volume of literature, both in print form and on the internet. The work that follows is intended to provide a concise and readable overview of the whole field. All the major areas of collection management are covered – collection policy, selection, acquisitions and licensing, evaluation, preservation, deselection and cooperation between libraries in collecting activities. The aim of the book is to help the reader who has had little or no direct experience in this important area of library and information work to gain a sound basic understanding of what collection management involves, so that he or she has some insight into what people who work in collection management do and the interesting challenges they face. The book is not a detailed ‘how to do it’ manual for such collection management activities as devising a collection development policy or weeding the collection, though the reader new to such activities will find some guidance here on what is involved.

Though very much has been written on collection management topics, much of what is available is rather specialised, and a very large proportion relates primarily to academic libraries in North America. While such libraries have very largely shaped modern collection management and continue to drive many of the developments in the field, the present work views the subject from a perspective that is not North American or British and focuses more on smaller institutions, particularly smaller public or special libraries, in which many information professionals and para-professionals work. Much of the discussion will draw on an awareness of the Australian experience, the one most familiar to the writer. The Australian experience of collection management has much in common with that of North America – unsurprisingly, as it has often been the American lead that has quite consciously been followed in Australia. But there are also distinctively Australian aspects to collection management in Australian libraries, and a consideration of these should be of interest not only to Australian readers but also to those in other areas remote from the major libraries of North America and Western Europe.

Authors may sometimes try to convince themselves otherwise, but there can be little real doubt that students undertaking courses in library and information science, and their teachers, form a large proportion of the readers of books on librarianship topics. It is my intention and hope that students preparing themselves for careers in information work will indeed find this book helpful to them in their studies. As part of their course they may be required or encouraged to study a subject with a title like ‘Collection Management’ or ‘Collection Development’, for which the syllabus corresponds fairly closely to the list of topics covered in this book. Or they may be asked to undertake subjects with a somewhat different focus that nevertheless deal significantly with the concerns of collection management, which is indeed relevant to much that happens in library and information work.

It is hoped, however, that the odour of the textbook will not cling too heavily to the pages that follow. The primary intention is to provide for any who might be interested a concise overview of a dynamic and stimulating area of information work. The extent to which the work manages to convey to the reader a sense of the continuing and indeed renewed vitality of collection management as we move further into a predominantly electronic information environment will be an important measure of its success.

References

The Macquarie dictionary. 4th edn. NSW: Macquarie Library, Macquarie University; 2005.

Chapter 1

The changing collection management environment

What is collection management?

For someone not familiar with librarians and their terminology, the phrase ‘collection management’ is likely to be puzzling, or at best unrevealing. It is not an especially transparent phrase – indeed, the non-librarian might be forgiven for thinking that it must be virtually a synonym for librarianship itself. One might reasonably think that the core of the traditional work of librarians is the management of its collection of materials.

Among librarians, however, the phrase ‘collection management’ has come to be used in a somewhat narrower and more specialised sense. According to this usage, ‘collection management’ is concerned with a set of interrelated library activities focusing on the selection, acquisition, evaluation, preservation and deselection (or weeding) of library materials. It does not include everything that might logically be regarded as part of managing a collection. For example, cataloguing and classification, and the corresponding procedures for the bibliographic control of internet resources, could logically be regarded as part of managing a collection, but these are not generally considered under the heading ‘collection management’. This is largely no doubt because they are such rich and complex specialisations in their own right. Similarly, the area of librarianship which focuses on providing advice to readers to help them satisfy their information needs is not usually regarded as part of collection management, though of course selection and other collection management activities must be conducted with a constant awareness that the primary reason for collecting is to serve the needs of present and future library