20 Maxims for Collection Building

At the Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, New York, last fall, Barbara Genco, collection development director at the Brooklyn Public Library, taught a course on collection development principles, theory, and practice. LJ asked her to distill her curriculum down to 20 talking points that address the future of collection development and the working world awaiting this generation of library school graduates.

The impact of technology has transformed libraries. What we're trying to teach in library school now is that the job requires skills of inquiry, investigation, and rethinking. Collection development, vendor relationships, ethics, stewardship of collections—all these things continue, but the environment is entirely changed and will keep changing indefinitely.

Librarians are looking at the functionality of integrated library systems and seeing how they can empower their customers, whether placing a hold online, registering online for library cards, or managing and renewing library books online. Our library has Smart Cards—what we call Access Brooklyn Cards—so customers can put money on their library cards, pay their fines through kiosks, pay for printing, reserve time on computers—even buy a Snapple from the vending machine. This requires better and more careful attention to patron records in our integrated systems but also a real understanding of and the respect for our customers' privacy needs.

As for libraries accepting credit cards for their Smart Cards, the infrastructure really has to work with our integrated systems. In the future, a lot of libraries will no doubt consider accepting credit cards, probably in wealthier areas first. But there's still the concern of protecting patron privacy: if there's a lapse in the control of the data, that's a real potential liability for libraries.

We're trying to balance securing media and empower- ing patrons, for instance, with RFID and patron self-check. So if we put certain high-interest, high-risk materials in public areas without a security case, how do we manage the issues related to securing them if we're committed to patron empowerment—so patrons can pick up their own holds, check out their own books? Of course, in five years, as formats change, this won't be an issue, but right now DVDs are the big elephant in the room. We don't keep our DVDs in security cases, and our customers seem to appreciate the additional privacy and control that affords them. After all, that's how they're doing business at places like airports and grocery stores.

I love the whole notion of tagging, and I'm fascinated with the idea of customer-created taxonomies, for example, on YouTube. Maybe it's a video of a cat, but what am I tagging it with so that other people can find that video? It's like the Steve Project (www.steve.museum), the social tagging project through which major art museums find other ways to tag artworks. Historically, the kind of data they collected had a lot to do with media, size, provenance, name—with virtually no data touching on a painting's content. Looking at the Steve Project was absolutely transformative for me. I realized that I could find out who owned Rembrandt's Prodigal Son, but I couldn't get a good idea of the image by using a search term.

I do like the concept of [the social cataloging application] LibraryThing for Libraries (www.librarything.com/forlibraries), but, for institutions of our size and complexity, running a beta system parallel with our integrated systems would mean a lot of testing, complicate vendor processes, and require more staff and financial resources. If we were in a freestanding building, I might think about LibraryThing as a worthwhile investment. But, for now, I'm just waiting to see what Danbury [Library, CT] learns from the experience.

Books are no longer just physical objects in codex form—they're audio, Braille, large print, paperback, and electronic. There are so many ways the same content can be repurposed or reformatted. Our focus in libraries for too long has been on managing the container holding the information, not on managing and presenting the content within. [Note OCLC's 2004 report on the separation of content from format: www.oclc.org/reports/2004format.htm.]

A lot of librarians are rethinking processing and handling, focusing on keeping the collections mobile and available at all times. How do we make sure our customers can get at our collections? How do we effectively move them from place to place? Do we work with third-party vendors to do this for us or do it ourselves? Should we consider floating our collections, as some libraries already do?

If you're at a large library with in-depth collections and are considering placing materials in offsite storage, you have some decisions to make: How do you provide access to these materials, and what is the time you can tolerate in getting and retrieving the content and bringing it to customers when they request it?

Within the explosion of content digitization, too, there's been a lot of concern over both the cost of preserving disintegrating materials and the loss of revenue for public and other libraries that manage and support really great spaces that can deal with their fragile items. How do we preserve the knowledge of the ages, make it accessible to our customers without destroying the objects—those codex books—themselves? It's a big challenge, and I don't think anyone's really sorted it out.

In trying to determine what downloadable and digital collections mean for us today and what they'll mean in the future, we've certainly been successful with models like OverDrive, though we still have to pay attention to the penetration of broadband, which is not so deep in Brooklyn. But other people are now in that space, such as Recorded Books/NetLibrary, and others are coming along. Then we look outside the library world, at Netflix, or Blockbuster, or audible.com. How do we deal with that? Librarians are really struggling—especially in public-sector libraries—to integrate downloadable and digital, to find the right vendors and the right balance.

And because Apple is so focused on keeping customers within the Apple family, downloadable audio doesn't work with iPods, and that, along with issues surrounding digital rights, is a real dilemma for libraries. Ultimately, it's got to be the big boys who work this out for us. But we've got a huge stake in the problem. We mustn't become a graveyard of failed technology.

Most people expect our OPAC to be like Amazon for them. So what we're doing is enhancing and providing functionality. We disclose to our customers how many copies we have, if the copies are on order, where a book is sitting on the shelf, if it's in transit from one building to another. All that information is much more transparent now. And many libraries have licensed tools like [R.R. Bowker's] Syndetic Solutions, or Baker & Taylor's Content Café, or Serials Solutions, for example, to show in our OPAC what we actually have.

How we get from point A to point B is increasingly important for us in technical services and collection development, especially in the case of multiple library sites. When I talk to students about how we managed to create shelf lists and card catalogs and do reprographics and the beginning of MARC and union catalogs and so on, they are absolutely stunned because they live in a post-technology world. The basic expectations for most 21st-century libraries for technology have been ratcheted up—it's an exponential change, not an incremental one. We did things in our own low-tech sort of way, and now we're harnessing technology to be much more efficient.

We've been spending a lot of time on the MARC record in our library because it's the kind of metadata that libraries use to represent their holdings, the content they own. People are increasingly expecting to be able to identify content through a web search or through an OPAC search, and if it's not present in our OPAC, and we don't have a MARC record for it, it's that simple: it just doesn't exist for customers.

In the past, all our branches were self-contained universes, and our customers didn't have access to the entire holdings. Now, because of OCLC WorldCat, our relationships through OCLC, and our OCLC network, we can get materials to our customers as well as from branch to branch faster. And with customers able to search holdings for libraries in WorldCat, it's more important for us to get our holdings and our holdings symbol into WorldCat as soon as possible. Then anyone who is searching from anywhere in the world knows what we've bought, what we have, where it's available—and we can help them get it in a timely way.

Does every bit of the work in a technical services or collection development environment need to be managed by an MLS-credentialed librarian? Maybe it's better to have a paraprofessional be the employee who calls the newspaper or places a claim with a subscription agent. Also, by outsourcing the repetitive, detail-oriented work, staff have more time for direct public-service interactions like collection management, programming, and outreach—or, in an academic library, for bibliographic instruction and support for students developing specific research. We need to think about how each member of a collection development group contributes powerfully to the whole organization.

Libraries are using more statistics to measure productivity in collection development departments, to determine, for example, how many staffers are engaged in a particular task and where that task can be put in a series of sequential tasks to make everything as efficient as possible. Collection development librarians also must be able to make a case to administration that if someone gives us money, we need to say, “Okay, I hear you, that's a great thing. We just need to caution you that it will probably take us this long to spend that money or acquire those items based on the metrics we've done. And if you need it to be done faster, then we'll have to negotiate within our organization about how we're going to provide the human resources to do that—whether we're going to do it in-house or outsource it.”

I'm on our library's resource management planning panel; thinking about what things cost and how donations should optimally be placed and distributed for physical processing, management, cataloging, and other tasks while managing change is not something I learned in library school. A resource that's helped me, and which I'd recommend to librarians in the same boat, is the Public Library Association's Staffing for Results: A Guide to Working Smarter (2002).

With the dramatic reduction in print reference materials and the number of ready-reference information questions we field—customers now instead going to the World Wide Web—we have to rethink traditional notions of reference as well as how to organize our collections and what kind of collections we should have. We should be using our reference skills both to create and develop content and to deliver it to our customers so that they can get authoritative information that is vetted and organized by librarians. I still think librarians do it best. Just look around: people with library degrees are no longer working exclusively in libraries. Tech companies consider job applicants with library degrees as real assets. That's because today's librarians are so adept at using technology, they have a remarkable kind of energy.

Policies are absolutely essential. Every library—academic, public, school, special—has to have some general mission statement, a selection policy, and a methodology for reconsideration and issues related to collection maintenance. All these things must be articulated, and there needs to be collaboration with library stakeholders. This sort of work is never a waste of time—to develop a materials selection policy or a formal method of reconsidering materials if there's a challenge, or to train staff on issues related to intellectual freedom.

Because of Google, people can discover more information. They're more independent searchers. The way we once created our collections, which were supposed to be more mediated, has to change dramatically: we have to create access points in the “wider web” to the content we hold for our customers. Since we're part of OCLC WorldCat, we're happy to see our information exposed on the web, and librarians are more than ever asking vendors to help them do the same so that when users narrow down an article by zip code, they'll be directed to our library. There is a real demand for vendors to acknowledge that this is how people are now finding that information.

In the last five years, our library has seen a tremendous change in the number of licenses we negotiate annually. This has come later to public libraries than to academic and special institutions; certainly the business world and academic libraries have had to go more aggressively than public libraries into this type of content. We are also becoming a partial depository for government documents. We spend a great deal of time creating copy cataloging, creating MARC records in our database, or copy cataloging MARC records for government items/information. With the diminution in the number of printed government documents being made available to the public, we have to make it very clear and easy for our customers to find this information through searches of our OPAC.

Our library's vendor relationships have turned in the last few years into real partnerships. We spend a great deal of time identifying the right vendor, negotiating the aspects of our relationship, and determining how that vendor is going to integrate various other vendors and various types of ordering methodologies into the work we do within our own ILS. Once you're efficient about selecting, you can better predict your stance on future acquisitions. And when you're really trying to manage your dollars well, you have less of your money tied up in materials encumbered by an inefficient system and more awareness about where you are financially at any given time. That's a great benefit.

Many libraries buy their materials prepublication, trying more carefully to match holdings and demand early on. They have to, because their customers increasingly expect them to have the books on or around the date of publication. When the books have arrived, and they're in our collections, if we have five or more holds per live copy—that's our reorder point. Over time, you get pretty good at determining what the right number is. For the last Harry Potter book, for example, we bought 1300 copies, and the 5:1 metric worked beautifully. We try to apply this metric as much as possible, but with library budgets decreasing, it can be challenging.

Our library's daily pick lists for holds have so many different titles on them. People have gotten accustomed to choice because they're using something like Netflix to find every movie ever made with Alan Bates, queue them up, and watch every single one. Now we're seeing someone who says, “Oh, I really love this book by Ian McEwan. What else has he written?” The same way that people go through one correlative search of YouTube or Flickr or whatever place they go, even Amazon, I want to read every review of this book, I want to read what the customers say about it. People are expanding their focus. That culture may be mass, but also it gives more allowances or opportunities for individualism. It's a wonderful dichotomy, isn't it?