Thursday, August 14, 2008

Marion, Madam Librarian

It may have occurred to some of you to wonder if I don’t enjoy any of the processes involved in being a librarian, which has been, after all, my profession for 25 years. And indeed, I do. I especially enjoy what is called collection development or collection management. That’s a matter of ascertaining what the library needs to add to its collection, and what remove. Acquisitions – the actual ordering of items to be added – can be a part of collection development, or separate. In a small library such as mine, in which not that many items are ordered each month, and staffing is very limited, acquisitions is often performed by the same person, in this case, me.

I love trying to decide what should be ordered. This calls for a consideration of many factors, including how much money do I have to spend in each area, and provides an opportunity to exercise my professional judgment, which is always satisfying. The process includes, for example, investigating the contents of preview boxes of children’s books sent to me from time to time by book distributors (the middleman between publishers and libraries). I look to see what grabs me, then see if we have holes or weaknesses in the collection that the items could fill. With children’s books I have to consider reading level: we may have a book or two on the solar system, but are they at a higher reading level than this particular book? In most subject areas, as well as in fiction, you try to have some books at all three reading levels: very easy to read, slightly more advanced, more advanced yet. In fiction, you must also have picture books – lots of picture books – which are generally read to children who cannot yet read.

This is also when I can find myself doing what we call weeding. As I’m looking at the books we have I may discover two or three that we need to withdraw – they’re too old for the topic, possibly so old-fashioned in appearance (pen and ink drawings for illustrations, for example) that no modern-day child would give them a second glance, they haven’t been checked out in ages. Removing books from the collection is also part of the process.

As for adult books, I don’t get preview boxes; I read mini-reviews in publications like Library Journal and the New York Times Book Review. This is great fun. As a public librarian I am less concerned with nonfiction that I would be in an academic library – which is one of the things I miss about working in an academic library – and of necessity must be most concerned with keeping the best sellers streaming in. Even here, though, I must try to find a balance between ordering all the latest James Pattersons/Robert Parkers/W.E.B. Griffins/Danielle Steels, and selecting new authors for readers to try. And I have the challenge of trying to ascertain what sorts of nonfiction books my particular patrons will be interested in. This has to be done over time, through observation of what goes out and what doesn’t; it’s part of the process.

I also enjoy the process of providing reference assistance. Someone is looking for particular information – where to look? You become a kind of detective. Often you have to ask questions to get at exactly what information the patron is looking for. A classic example of the importance of what is called the reference interview is having a patron come in asking where’s your section on horses, and finally getting at the fact that what he really wants is a book that will show him how to draw horses. Or you have someone say she’s looking for information on china -- is that dishes or countries the lady is interested in?

A very different process that I enjoy is that of cataloging. Here my penchant for having things according to Hoyle is in its element. Uh-oh, that information should be in field 520 of the record, not 500. Or the information in the Series Name field needs cleaning up, or that in the publisher information field. What’s really fun is when you have to supply all the information for all the fields in a record – original cataloging – but most catalogers do little of that these days, unless their collection is very distinctive, and they are unable to find records already out there, in one of the larger catalogs that one can tap into and extract records from.

Among the numerous frustrations of my current position is that I do very little cataloging, or reference. And other tasks that I do have responsibility for, such as programming (i.e., coming up with special events to be held in the library – which always seem to involve a great deal of work with, in the end, almost nobody showing up) and computer trouble-shooting, I do not enjoy at all, or do particularly well. But, life must have its frustrations, or one would be insufferably happy...

2 comments:

Joey Harrison said...

I've been curious about the acquisition process. My interest got started when I moved to Toledo and discovered that, while their library system is otherwise excellent, their music CD collection is pathetic. It seemed as though they were assembled by donation or picked up at garage sales.

Now I'm in Louisville, where the library system is still very good, but perhaps a notch below Toledo. But to their credit, they have an outstanding collection of music CDs. Someone puts a great deal of care in selection.

Melody said...

Joey, it is quite possible that the music collection in Toledo depended to a large extent on donations -- ours does. Things like audio books, music CDs, and DVDs are quite expensive, relative to their likely life span, as compared with most books. Music CDs especially are very likely to go out, and never come back. Libraries can't afford too much of that.