The importance of a collection development policy is to provide guidelines for maintaining the collection. According to the American Library Association’s Core Competencies of Librarianship, a librarian should be able to manage information resources and understand the concepts, issues, and methods related to the acquisition and disposition of resources.
During the year that I worked at the Media Center at the University of Washington Libraries, I was able to help with collection development in accordance with their collection development policy.
Accession Projects
In collaboration with John Vallier, the director of the Media Center, I created lists based on faculty, staff, or student suggestions in preparation for purchase of DVDs and CDs. I was trained in the use of a popular acquisition software, Baker and Taylor. If materials were not available in Baker and Taylor, then I would locate other sources to acquire our materials. Baker and Taylor is a large database for selecting books and other library materials. This is a screenshot of an order for purchase that I developed for the Media Center. This involves using search skills in their database screening for various filters. For instance, one can search by title, director, performer, and format.
Deaccession Project
The Media Center is moving to another building in June 2012, and there will be less storage at the new site. So in accordance with our collection development policy, I initiated a weeding project. I took into account that format plays an important role in our holdings. Over the year, I noticed that many patrons did not have the ability to play VHS videos because they owned DVD players and not VHS players. In addition, VHS is a lot bulkier for the Media Center to store (compared to DVD). By creating lists in our library database, Millenium, I developed a query to make two lists. 1) all of our VHS holdings 2) all of DVD holdings. In Excel I compared the titles and looked for duplicates. Here is a last page of the weeding list in Excel. The purpose was to identify VHS tapes which we also owned in DVD format. I was able to locate about 950 VHS tapes which could be deaccessioned and still be able to meet the demand of our library users with the DVD titles in our collection.
For the Future
I am looking forward to continuing to learn about collection development. I know that ALA has a Collection Development Librarians of Academic Libraries IG Forum for discussing collection development and management in academic and research libraries. This is an information network limited to librarians who perform collection development functions in all academic and research libraries not included in the Chief Collection Development Officers of Large Research Libraries Interest Group. I would like to join this discussion group in order to promote my understanding of collection development principles.