Mary Grace Faulkner, pictured above with her family, spent one semester at Stanley Library practicing collections development and learning how the library runs. She compared the physical books in the library collection to the Library of Congress’ official classification system in order to find gaps, then found books to recommend in order to fill those gaps. This internship completes her bachelor's degree in History with a minor in English, completed at Ferrum College.
In November 2011, Ferrum president Dr. Jennifer Braaten informed Stanley Library director George Loveland that the library needed to carve out room for two classrooms (with a third added halfway through the process) from the main book floor upstairs in the library. This would mean eliminating thousands of books, but Dr. Braaten refused George's repeated requests for additional time for a more careful purging, during which the library staff could have determined what was available electronically, and received faculty input about what could be discarded and what should be kept.
In just the four months between April and August 2012 the library staff, with the critical help of several volunteers and the library's summer student worker, pulled, de-cataloged, and discarded 45,000 books - nearly half the print collection - primarily from the humanities and religion. The vast majority of the books went to a charity bookseller called Better World Books, which was willing to send giant shipping crates for packing the books for free, then having them picked up and shipped out for free as well. The classrooms would become LA 203, 204, and 205, and shortly after the culling's end, the whole event became known at the library and among some faculty and staff simply as the Great Purge.
Foreword by Danny Adams, 10/24/2023.
Library collection development is the process of systematically building the collection of a particular library to meet the information needs of the library users (a service population) in a timely and economical manner using information resources locally held as well as resources from other organizations.
According to the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), acquisition and collection development focuses on methodological and topical themes pertaining to acquisition of print and other analogue library materials (by purchase, exchange, gift, legal deposit), and the licensing and purchase of electronic information resources.
Collection development involves activities that need a librarian or information professional who is specialized in improving the library's collection. The process includes the selection of information materials that respond to the users or patrons need as well as de-selection of unwanted information materials, called weeding. It also involves the planning strategies for continuing acquisition, evaluation of new information materials and the existing collection in order to determine how well a particular library serves its users.
Works Cited:
“Guidelines for a Collection Development Policy Using the Conspectus Model.” IFLA, IFLA Acquisition and Collection Development Section, July 2001, www.ifla.org/.
Works Cited:
Kpekoll. “Collection Maintenance and Weeding.” Tools, Publications & Resources, American Library Association, 29 Dec. 2017, www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit/weeding.