Entrelib 2014 - Collection Development

On Friday, 17 October, I attended the 2014 Conference for Entrepreneurial Librarians at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, NC. The sessions were thought provoking.

A New Collection Development Culture: Focusing on Individual Faculty by Sharon Holderman, Coordinator of Public Services at Angelo and Jeanette Volpe Library at Tennessee Tech University stood out for me. When Ms. Holderman arrived at Tennessee Tech, the collection policy could be summarized as doing what we’ve always done base on what we did twenty years ago. This include a well entrenched but poorly documented allocation formula and a culture of last minute spending to avoid losing allocated funds. This was replaced with a book policy of “if you want it, we will buy it” (within reason). There were no more allocated budgets, but items were tracked for purposes of understanding expenditures. The policy empowered faculty to add to the collection based on actual needs. Librarians were empowered to fulfill faculty wants and desires and the library received goodwill from the faculty. The library changed processes making the entire program more transparent and removing obstacles to selecting books.

At the same time several high cost per use subscriptions were cancelled and the Library instituted unmediated Get It Now for faculty and graduate students. Faculty were empowered to purchased urgently needed articles, but often still opted to use ILL to acquire materials. Materials that had been underutilized were replaced with access to more journals from many publishers. The changes in the policies allowed Volpe Library to save money in the serials budget and shift allocations to the departments the desperately needed additional materials. I believe the changes were largely successful because librarians were able to effectively communicate the changes to the faculty in a way that created goodwill.

Hopefully, Ms. Holderman will follow up with a full paper in the Journal for Library Innovation. I look forward to thinking about patron driven approaches like this further.

Census Records

Census records are interesting documents - I find them fascinating because of what they can't describe. In 1900, my thrice great grandmother was living in Chicago. The census lists her relation to the head of household as "roomer". While not being inaccurate - the head of household was running a boarding house and she may have been paying rent - it is incomplete. You see, the head of household was previously married to her daughter, my thrice great aunt. This aunt died thirty years before. So, my thrice great grandmother could be described as either his mother-in-law or his former mother-in-law. The census worker probably called this too much information or recorded the information from talking with the neighbors. (It is not the only inaccuracy on the part of that census taker - his second wife - I found the marriage license, is listed as "wage hand". I suspect if I reported my wife as a wage hand I wouldn't be married for much longer. She was still with him when he died eight years later and inherited the property.)

Thirty years later, in the 1930 census, the same family once again stymies the census worker. The second wife owns the property. She is the head of household. All the other occupants of the house are initially listed as "roomer". The first two - both teenagers with the same last name, are crossed out and replaced with "relative". Again this is incomplete. The head of house hold is a widow. The two teenagers are her stepson's children. They are either her step grand children or her step son's children. Too much for the census.