Tag: collection development

Hearts and daggers and spaceships

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | libraries

Scanning the fiction shelves of your local public library, there are a lot of books with labels on the spines for romance, mystery and science fiction. There’s at least one standard brand of those labels where the romance label was a heart, the mystery label was a dagger, and the sci-fi label was a spaceship.

This isn’t about the labels. This is about the books.

Back in the Dark Ages (pre-Internet), librarians were the ones who knew when new books were coming out. How did we know? We had some great magazines (yes, magazines) that reviewed books just a few weeks, or maybe even a couple of months, before they came out, so we could order them. Those publications are still familiar names: Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus, etc. They still publish reviews. And let’s not forget the venerable New York Times Book Review every Sunday and their best seller list.

But the world around them has changed. Everyone knows when books are coming out. Amazon and Barnes & Noble may have books available for pre-order more than six months ahead of publication. But it’s more than that. Reviews are no longer the domain of a select few. Anyone can review a book and post their review on the net. Not just on Amazon and B&N, but also on Goodreads, Shelfari and LibraryThing.

Back to the hearts and daggers and spaceships. Once upon a time, most fiction bestsellers were “just plain” fiction. Today, most fiction bestsellers are part of one or more genres. They are romance, or mystery, or science-fiction, or fantasy, or one of the new genres like urban fantasy or paranormal. Or one of the tried-and-true variations, like horror or thriller or espionage. But fiction sells better today when it is in an easily defined category. Just like cable television has broken down into a zillion niche channels, so has publishing.

Genre readers have also developed their own niches on the net where they publish news and reviews and author interviews, just like the traditional review magazines that libraries have always relied on do. The difference is that many of the genre sites are doing this out of love, and not necessarily for money. For many, this is as much about the fandom as it is about the literature. But they still make terrific review sources for a lot of material that may not be covered by traditional reviewers, particularly not in vast quantity.

Every public library already knows whether they are going to purchase James Patterson’s next book. Or Nora Roberts’ next, whichever name she writes it under (I’m waiting for New York to Dallas with the proverbial baited breath myself). Librarians just don’t need to see the reviews for certain authors, because it doesn’t matter whether the book is good or bad, it will still be “hot”.

But monitoring a group of genre fiction blogs and websites, even if it is a moving target, can bring in a lot of really great material, including ebooks, for your patrons, and can help separate the wheat from the proverbial dusty chaff. Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Fiction Vixen both review romance, and lots of it. This is a great thing, since there is an awful lot of romance published, and nowhere near enough of it gets reviewed anywhere except online, particularly the ebook-only titles. All Things Urban Fantasy, Para Your Normal and Galaxy Express (Science Fiction Romance) cover subgenres that aren’t necessarily even thought of by more traditional reviewing sources.

Locus Magazine and the SciFiGuy both review science fiction and fantasy. The Rap Sheet and Criminal Element cover (or uncover) Mystery. And many of these sites have that wonderful feature, a blog roll. Veritable treasure troves of sites in the same bailiwick.

As both selection resources for collection development and readers’ advisory resources for patron services, these sites are fantastic. They can answer questions like “what is the authors’ preferred reading order for the Liaden series vs. the publication order?” and “If I have patrons who like Sookie Stackhouse but not Anita Blake, what else should I buy?” There’s also the ever popular question of where to go for clues on what to purchase to fill in the ebook selection on OverDrive.  Those are the most popular genres, and most of them are not reviewed. Checking out the purchaser reviews on Amazon, or going to a specialty site like Fiction Vixen may help you decide.

And it’s fun.

Missouri State Library Summer Institute

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | About> presentations

One week ago, I was standing in front of one of the Advanced Classes at the Missouri State Library Summer Institute, all geared up to conduct three days of presentations on Collection Development and Acquisitions.

Let me say this up front, library folks in Missouri really rock! Everything was set up and ready for me, from the hotel arrangements to the PC setup to the class lists. Sharla Lair, the coordinator for the Missouri State Library, did an absolutely bang up job, and I can’t thank her enough for all of her help.

The people in my class were a terrific group. They represented libraries from all over the state, at every position from clerk to director.

Class started after an early lunch on Tuesday, and ended just before lunch on Thursday. In that time, I needed to cover not just Collection Development, but also the basics of Acquisitions.

That’s both a long and a short amount of time. There’s an old joke about the true theory of the relativity of time. How long “just a minute” is depends on which side of the bathroom door you are on.

On the one hand, 16 contact hours is a lot of content to prepare for. On the other hand, 16 contact hours is not as much time as I would have liked to cover everything in two very big topics.

The agenda distilled into some big building blocks. It’s difficult to talk about something without defining it. We all know what collection development is, but that’s mostly by doing it. Looking at what it is and what it isn’t makes for a very interesting discussion. Acquisitions, after all, is what we buy. Collection Development is what we keep.

A lot of class discussion concerned determining who the community is that we are developing the collection for, and then determining what that community wants and needs. It’s not just about getting stuff, after all. It’s about figuring out what stuff to get. And what stuff not to get. And the best way to allocate staff time in selecting which stuff to get. I introduced the class to a new range of selection resources for fiction, ranging from the tried-and-true like fiction-l to Locus to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and Fiction Vixen. This part was probably the most fun.

Policy-writing is not fun. It’s just necessary. The policy-writing discussion and the intellectual freedom/materials challenge class exercise turned out to be even more on target than I had planned when I prepared the class. The Republic Missouri school board banned two books, Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler and the Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five from the high school curriculum and the libraries in April 2011. A third book, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, was challenged but not banned. The challenges were filed in the summer of 2010, but it took the Republic School Board a year to decide the cases because they first had to formulate a materials challenge policy and procedure.

The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is offering free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to students from Republic High School.

It’s hard to beat both local relevance and recent news coverage for giving a class more immediacy. But I tried. Digital is a big issue for collection development. If 8% of the US population owns a tablet, and 12% of the population owns an ereader, and 20% of the people in book groups use one or the other to read their book group’s selection each month, what does that mean for demand of ebooks? Even knowing that those populations have to overlap? And how does the purchase or license of ebooks affect both collection development and a shrinking acquisitions budget?

I know I learned a lot during my three days at the Summer Institute. I’ve always said that teaching a subject is one of the best ways to learn it. I believe that everyone in the class took away some knowledge that they didn’t have before. I think they also had fun. I know they had chocolate.

I also took away some great insights about Missouri libraries and library workers. And some really good stuff about what to do to make my next presentation even better.

 

Reading Reality on the road

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | About> presentations

On August 9 through August 11 I will be in Columbia, Missouri at the Library Skills Summer Institute hosted by the State Library of Missouri. For those three days I will be presenting a workshop on Collection Development and Acquisitions.

I am so thrilled to be doing this workshop. Collection Development may be the most fun thing you can do at a library. A friend once told me that  one of the greatest gifts you can give someone is a good book recommendation. Collection Development is like giving your entire community book recommendations. And you get to be a trendspotter, following what’s hot and what’s not.

And do we ever have a lot to cover! When the folks at the State Library asked me to teach this session, the instructions were to cover the nitty-gritty of Collections Development, and just a little bit of Acquisitions, in three days. Starting from after lunch Tuesday, to just before lunch on Thursday.

The topics are intended to be practical, things that people can use when they go back to work on Friday, or Monday. But I packed a lot into those three days, because Collection Development is so “hands-on”.

A couple weeks ago, I had a middle-of-the-night revelation. We often conflate Collection Development and Acquisitions, but they aren’t quite the same. At 3 am, it came to me. Acquisitions is what you buy, Collection Development is what you keep! The auditors only care about Acquisitions. Your gifts policy is Collection Development, but not Acquisitions.

The workshop goes into the reasons why every library needs to have a Collection Development Policy, and how to write one. Materials challenges come in all shapes and sizes, but they are much, much easier to handle when your library has a process outlined, and that process is part of the CD policy.

There’s so much more to cover. I can only hit the high points in the time available. And I hope that everyone walks away believing that we had a good time together, and that we learned something together. I know I will learn a lot. The best way to learn something is to teach it.

Now if only the butterfly convention would move out of my stomach. There must be some other presenter somewhere who needs the adrenaline way more than I do.