99Collections

1. The organization of collection management in academic libraries

There is no agreed usage for the terms collection development and collection management - in fact the two are used as rather loose synonyms. However, reflection would demonstrate that they do imply different concepts and some distinction is a necessary preamble to any discussion. Collection development relates to the selection and acquisition of material for an expanding collection and decisions on the material to be included in that collection. Collection management may subsume this, but also includes the allocation of the bookfund and the balance between books, journals and conservation; the disposition of stock between open and closed access, between different media and between branches of the library and stores; and, finally, the monitoring and encouragement of collection use. In sum, collection management also includes issues concerned with conservation and disposal, and is aimed more at the presentation of the collection to the user than at the collection itself. It should be clear from this wide definition of collection management that a variety of types of staff will be involved in different ways and at different times. As with all library activities there is no 'right' or 'wrong' way to manage the activity. The library must decide the importance it attaches to the management of its collections and then deploy staff and other resources in the light of local needs and opportunities.

Before considering staffing structures it is necessary to look at the activities undertaken by the library in managing its collections and at the pressures which bear on them. Some of this touches inevitably on the themes developed in other chapters. This chapter will consider the organization and staffing of the various operations within collection management, relationships with academic staff and departments, and where collection management sits as an activity within the organization and in relation to other organizations. Although the divisions are far from watertight, for ease of consideration, the activities will be considered under four heads:

• collection development;

• collection evaluation;

• stock relegation and disposal;

• staff structure.

Collection development

The growth of library collections throughout the expansionist years of the 1960s and early 1970s was spectacular and can largely be attributed to those staff called subject specialists. Libraries appointed staff, in effect as bibliographers, whose role was principally that of guiding the expansion of the collections rather than serving the needs of the majority of readers, although in some libraries there was a real attempt to marry the two activities in one individual member of staff. The end of this era was signalled by the much execrated Atkinson report,' but it has taken a further decade of retrenchment and staff losses before the concept of the subject specialist has been brought seriously into question again. Woodhead and Martin² conducted a survey which suggested that we may have reached (and now passed) “the high water mark of subject specialization in British university libraries”. This seems more than likely to be the case. The challenges facing libraries have been changing in the last decade, and it is not obvious that a set of staffing structures devised to cope with the problems and needs of a period of growth in collections and indeed in universities are necessarily the same as those required for a period of contraction, moderated by the growth of technologies which increasingly allow readier access to material and information from outside the collection.

Subject Specialists

Subject specialists tend to have highly developed territorial instincts expressed as 'my faculty' or 'my subject' and a much less developed view of the library collections as a whole. Now that possession of information is no longer synonymous with its provision, library managers must increasingly take this into account in developing staffing structures. It 'will be increasingly important for library staff to possess the technical competencies to access information elsewhere rather than acquire it locally. Advocates of the system of subject specialists also argue that it has been an important element in recruiting high-quality staff, but changes in the ways in which libraries control and manage information may have begun to make functionally organized structures attractive again to good and ambitious staff, who will wish to have information management rather than subject skills. This whole process of the erosion of subject-specialist posts is also perhaps being hastened by the retirement (often regrettably early) of that cohort of staff appointed in the Robbins era of the early 19605, their posts then being frozen or downgraded.

Even within functional structures it is probably desirable that a sort of hybrid system operates. Matrix management is a fashionable but useful tool which allows staff to perform a variety of tasks without the rigidity and inflexibility of the extreme versions of functional or subject-based organization. It would be a foolish chief librarian who did not take some account of the need for a spread of language and subject skills amongst library staff and, having obtained such subject skills, deploy them to best effect. This can be seen in the area of collection development, where input from library staff who have developed subject knowledge can both originate book recommendations and moderate the aspirations of over-zealous academic staff.

It is also important to consider the role of the acquisitions staff. An acquisitions department with a relatively stable staff possibly has the best overall impression of the way in which collections are developing and the balance obtaining between subject areas. Yet all too often they are employed in a purely technical role as a channel between library and bookseller. To use the acquisitions staff as gatekeepers with an active role in collection development takes full advantage of the expertise they have built up.

Liaison with academic staff

Under most organizational structures there is a member of academic staff within each academic department who is nominated to act as liaison with the library. This practice explains much of the almost whimsical growth of so many library collections. Some of these individuals treat their role very seriously, others see it as an administrative chore; sometimes it is a task for the most junior member of depart.ment.al staff and sometimes a senior lecturer. If done well it can play a crucial role in opening a dialogue with the library on how a collection can be expanded. A good relationship with library staff usually ensures that a department will succeed in squeezing out more than its fair share of any spare funds, thus further enhancing both the collections and the relationship. Indeed such departments will often add their own funds to the library grant to expand the collections. Conversely, every institution has its bad departments where no act seems capable of awakening interest in the library. Naturally, such departments tend to be neglected and their collections stultify.

The precise nature of the relationship with academic staff requires careful attention. One of the longest-standing debates in managing collection development is over their involvement. In 1935Agnes Cuming, then Librarian of the University of Hull, wrote to the Librarian of King's College London that [the teaching staff] “so often make demands the consequences of which they do not realise and then their last state is worse than their first. “³ . In a paper given at the Newbury Seminar on bibliographic needs, Peasgood produced some firm indicative evidence that academic staff were no better at book selection than library staff.⁴ His evidence relates to monographs, but the same view is expressed in relation to journals with less evidence and more cynicism by Broude:

Though a faculty member may insist that a certain title is crucial to the library, if a librarian can indicate that the journal has no use, is very expensive, is little related to the curriculum, is unindexed, is available at a nearby library, is never cited by other published articles and is published by an organization with a poor reputation, then at least he has established the basis for a rational discussion about the merits of the journal.⁵

Budgetary allocation

An often unregarded aspect of collection management is budgetary allocation. In most institutions this has broadly reflected the historical strength of the different powerbases within the institution, although often masquerading in the gaudy but unconvincing dress of an objective formula. The pursuit of an objective formula for the allocation of bookfunds has been a sort of Holy Grail (more often of library committees than librarians) pursued relentlessly but ultimately fruitlessly. Too many factors conspire to prevent a great truth emerging. Most librarians have compounded this folly by examining cash rather than resources. A budget may be divided more or less equitably, but it can pass more or less unnoticed that a member of staff spends large quantities of time soliciting and then processing gifts in favour of a particular subject. That is not to criticize such initiative, but to note that it is almost universally omitted from any budgetary equation. The whole issue of resource management is considered further in Chapter 2. Another important element in this area is the view which is taken of the library budget. Is it a grant which is allocated to departments to spend, or is it a grant to the library which then seeks advice on how to spend its money wisely? Only if the latter view is adopted can library staff take an active role in collection development.

Collection development policies

The position becomes increasingly complicated with each year that passes and each circular that appears from the Universities Funding Council (UFC). It is now required of libraries by the UFC that they indicate how funds are being applied selectively. This can hardly be done by chance and will require a set of policy decisions. Bloomfield has .stressed the importance of collection development policies.⁶. Whereas in the past these may have appeared to develop naturally from the work of the subject librarians striving to expand the collections in almost all areas of knowledge, they are now highly charged political issues and inevitably the province of the most senior library management. Issues of resource sharing, which might appear to offer a substitute for a library's own collections, have implications well beyond the narrow boundaries of library efficiency. For a library to declare its intention (as it will increasingly be required to do) to cut back research provision in a subject can, and will be read as making a statement about academic priorities within the institution. To decide whether the library's mission is synonymous with that of the institution and if not, where and how it should differ, requires a wide perspective which is inevitably found only at the apex of an organization.

Written collection development policies have found much less favour in the UK than in other countries, but the external influences described above may well force a reconsideration of their value. The creation of a written statement of this sort should force the staff involved in its preparation to consider the goals of the organization, both long- and short-term, and the priorities to be attached to different activities. The prevailing view that libraries are, in the main, moving from holdings to access strategies perhaps implies that there will be a need to disseminate information on collecting policies widely. Further, as the generation of staff which has largely built the university collections of today begins to retire, management will perceive the need to record their collecting policies in order to ensure the continuity of collection development independently of the individuals concerned. All higher education institutions are increasingly faced with the discipline of formal planning of all aspects of their activities. It is probably inescapable and perhaps desirable that their libraries will undergo the same process. To state, at least in broad terms, what is to be purchased, what is to be kept and preserved and what disposed of will be a requirement., primarily of the institution and perhaps of the UFC..

Even in the harshest funding climates of recent years there has been in most libraries a vague notion of the equal distribution of resources, however inadequate. This will change, at least at the research level. If funds and collections are to be skewed in their distribution, this will have to be made clear. Gorman⁷ sees written policies as contracts between libraries and their users and this useful concept is a way of demonstrating to individuals within an institution precisely what they can expect of the library. Such documents will have little value if seen as once-and-for-all exercises, but if they fall within the planning cycle of the institution, this should ensure that they are regularly and sensibly updated as the needs and priorities of the institution develop. One of the major criticisms of such written collection-policy statements in the past has been their inflexibility. They have been seen as time-consuming and monolithic and libraries are perceived as doing quite well without them⁸. Such static documents certainly exist, but the need for a perhaps less specific rolling planning document may give the desired flexibility which the library and increasingly the institution - require. It should be stressed that such a policy statement is not a substitute for book selection, whether for acquisition or withdrawal; it.is a framework and set of parameters within which staff and readers can work.

The classic view of the development of such policies assumes a committee mainly of library staff, but including academic members of the library committee and perhaps administrators, to ensure a broad consensus and support for the final document. In the harsher world of research ratings and bids for student numbers, it is much more likely that the policy will be a fairly straightforward reflection of the research priorities of the organization as expressed in its institutional plan. Any deviation from that implies a political decision which is unlikely to be taken except at the most senior levels of management. There has been a tendency to recognize this in the appointment of collection-development managers operating at the sub-librarian or deputy-librarian level. Such staff will have a critical role in assembling the evidence to assess the present strengths of the collection and options for sensible collection building. However, even when such a collection policy is seen as a consequence of other documents rather than a free-standing statement in its own right, there is a need to discuss drafts of the document as widely as possible within the institution, especially with groups of users. There may be very little room for manoeuvre in collection policy once it becomes a small building block of an institutional plan, but users still have a right to be heard and considered, and to be kept fully informed of what they may expect from the library in the form of both collections and services.

Equally, if a collection is to be developed beyond the teaching support level within a subject, it would be foolish not to take the advice of academic staff on where emphasis should be placed. It is then the task of the library staff and ultimately the library committee to weld these different special interests into a coherent whole and match grand ambitions with available funds. If such a document is brief and concentrates on the hare bones of subjects, it will allow maximum flexibility within which those responsible for book selection can work and will free the institution from a major review exercise every time a change becomes necessary. Recent developments in practice make it easy to distinguish between such a policy document and the older, fuller type of document which is much closer to a sort of proto-Conspectus exercise.

Resource sharing

The notion of resource sharing cannot really he undertaken unt.il some such framework exists. Administrators will take it almost fix granted that library cooperation is entirely logical. Usually this view stems from a belief that such cooperation will result in economy. Long experience in libraries in the UK shows that cooperation is indeed desirable and beneficial, and that there is a string of successes ranging from LASER to SWALCAP, from CURL to SALBIN, but also that identifiable financial savings rarely accrue as a result. Benefits tend ultimately to be for library users rather than libraries. As serial prices continue to spiral and budgets to decline in real terms it seems inevitable that there will be an ever increasing pressure for interdependence and cooperation. In this respect the reports from LISC ⁹ which developed the themes of access strategies and local information plans have stimulated an active professional debate.

A recently completed study for the British Library Research and Development Department ¹⁰ by Pocklington and Finch showed library collections to be less and less able to meet the needs of academic staff. Collections were seen as becoming narrower, more homogeneous and more limited. Worse, collections were in effect becoming fragmented as staff and departments attempted to compensate for reducing library budgets by purchasing necessary material which was then housed in offices and departments libraries compound the problem by organizing cooperative purchase arrangements which expect users to travel to other libraries or rely on photocopies. This was seen as a great disincentive for users and risked making research poorer. As libraries increasingly adopt a utilitarian approach, scarcely aiming to do more than meet the needs of current users, collection building was progressively eroded and gaps created which will damage future research.

Progress in telecommunications, the continuing growth of databases as retroconversion proceeds and the emergence of OSI standards which will link systems and facilitate document delivery open up new possibilities for managing library resources and addressing the gloom of the Pocklington and Finch study. At present interlibrary loans constitute a tiny fraction of any library's total loans, but this will change. It is a paradox that the growth of retroconversion and OPACs makes the library's own catalogue less and less important. From the point of view of the users, a book in a nearby library found on a networked OPAC is more accessible than a copy of the same book in their own library's off-campus store which takes forty-eight hours to retrieve. It is unlikely that libraries can properly forego the collection locally of material required to support teaching programmes, but there is great scope for cooperation in the building of research collections. Stam¹¹ describes libraries 'linked in a great chain of access”, whether they like it or not. The British Library collects only a small percentage of the published output of the world each year and it is quite possible to envisage the sort of planning vision which enlightens RLG's Collection Management and Development Program being applied to the research collections of the UK. It aims “to expand the universe of materials that can be identified and delivered to scholars in a timely fashion” ¹². A consequence of such a pattern of cooperation is that much of the work of book selection will fall on library staff. It is only within the library that decisions can ultimately be made on whether book recommendations fall in or out of the scope of cooperative agreements.

Collection evaluation

The purpose of collection evaluation and monitoring is the straightforward one of establishing whether a collection is doing its job and whether it is doing so in the most cost-effective way. Although the definition is simple, it makes a number of assumptions which need to be explored about the purpose of collections and how their worth is to be assessed. The simplest aim is, of course, to satisfy the needs of present users. However, any major academic library will also have some regard for building collections for the future, so that there is not a single uniformly sensitive measure and the library will require to take a complex view of what the job of the collection is and how that can best be judged.

Performance measures

A large debate has opened up on performance measures. It can be characterized as having on one side administrators who are interested only in input measures such as pounds spent per student FTE and on the other librarians who are interested only in output measures such as document retrieval rates. Arguably there are two quite different purposes in such measures. Rightly or wrongly, busy administrators want only a very few measures of library performance and usually these are key statistics which can be compared with those of a similar basket of institutions. Here global figures for the whole library are needed and ones which can assess over time whether the library is meeting institutional goals. These will almost inevitably tend to relate to the institution's budgetary spend on the library. Such figures serve an important political purpose within the institution and it is important that the librarian agrees with the administration what the measures are to be and what targets are being set. For example, it may differ between institutions, and over time, as to whether it is desirable to have a rising or falling figure of pounds spent per student FTE. The major characteristic of administrative decision-makers is their wish not to be forced to make decisions. If they can avoid thinking about the library (or the chemistry department or the animal house) and its problems, they would prefer to do so. Good relations with the administration are worth much more than well argued and large documents, and one or two judiciously chosen macro-statistics which demonstrate that the administration has no need to worry about the library (assuming that to be the case) are what the administration desires.

Within the library a quite different approach is required to measure library performance and then to take action to change or modify outcomes. Not very surprisingly this requires some view of the purpose of the library and its constituent parts, which will vary between institutions. For example, opening hours can be modified to affect collection use. User needs at a campus university may be for long weekend opening hours, whereas in an inner-city area with no resident population, shorter opening hours and a more efficient but expensive recall and reservation system may have a greater effect on the use of collections. Similarly, the balance between closed and open access, and even on-site and off-site storage, can affect the use of collections. In order to assess which variables to alter, the library must have a clear view of its objectives, which may vary over time and i the light of circumstances. It is the role of any professional to determine what clients really need rather than what they think they need and evaluation of the collection in the broadest sense assists in making those decisions. This theme is explored more fully in Chapter 3.

Staffing

One aspect of library management which affects collection use is the availability of staff to assist the user. Two quite distinct schools of thought exist on this - apart from those libraries which offer no real assistance at all. First come those who see the role of the professional librarian as being to act as the first point of contact for users. This model offers immediate access to intermediaries able to interpret and deal with most difficulties, or to channel them to the appropriate quarter if not. The second model offers non-professional staffing of service points where all enquiries, other than the most basic ones, are channelled up to those particularly qualified to help. Opponents of the first model¹³ see the constant interruptions as a distraction from collection development and argue that if a service is too readily available its providers are undervalued, as is the service itself. Opponents of the second model¹⁴ argue that to present enquiries to the inexperienced is a disservice and inconvenience to readers, especially since the inexperienced staff may not really know where to refer questions. This is seen as misrepresenting the potential of the library. As in most debates there is no simple answer. The notion of readers interrupting staff who have more important things to do may seem risible, but in large libraries those charged with collection development may not be the most appropriate staff to help readers. Conversely, non-professional staff with long years of experience may be better equipped to help readers. It is a mistake to consider 'nonprofessional' and 'inexperienced' as synonyms. Many factors such as the rate of staff turnover and the ability of individuals to deal with the public will in the end determine the best deployment of staff. However, ultimately the decision will depend on whether the librarian and his staff wish to see the library as having a service or a collection-building ethos. The two are not exclusive, but the way in which staff resources are allocated to the two activities will inevitably determine the quality of services to readers.

Stock relegation and disposal

Weeding and stock relegation are too often seen as an unavoidable chore, put off whenever possible and in some sense diminishing the library. However, it is not necessary to go as far as supporting the concept of the self-renewing library to consider weeding as a positive and desirable method of improving service to readers. Thompson ¹⁵comments that 'the unusable library is more familiar to library users than to librarians. For a start most libraries are far too large for ready consultation.' Too many outdated and unused books can hamper access to those which arc in demand; they quite literally clog up the shelves. Perhaps part of the problem lies in the emotive term 'weeding' which implies discarding, when that is in fact only one option.

The long-standing concentration in the UK on open-access libraries has obscured the options of balancing collections between open access, closed access and store, as well as simple disposal. The research activity of continental universities is not noticeably hindered by their tradition of closed-access libraries and yet we have tended to take little notice of their experience and achievements. Deciding what to have easily and readily available and what requires more restricted treatment is part of the librarian's professional responsibility. It can be argued, for example, that, as a simple conservation measure, age should be used as a criterion to relegate material to closed access. In some areas of the collection any library may reasonably expect to have an archival function and the attitude to disposal will be quite different from those areas where the library collects to meet use and current institutional need. Here the only question is when, not whether, stock should be weeded. The selection of material for relegation will almost without exception have to be undertaken title by title, as classic studies conducted at Yale University have shown ¹⁶. This makes the task enormously time-consuming and one which probably has to be undertaken with the cooperation of academic staff - although the librarian's knowledge of who uses the collections, and how, is invaluable in determining overlaps of interest. The Yale study showed that the best method was for library staff to select material for withdrawal and then have academic staff validate the selections. Where pressure on space is acute an additional goad can be used, if necessary, through the requirement to clear a fixed number of metres of shelving in order to accommodate new stock.

Criteria

Ford ¹⁷ has defined criteria for weeding stock. These are: use; obsolescence; age; death (applies only to series or serials); physical decay; judgement. All but the last two are susceptible to mechanical judgements based on objective statistical or other evidence. Decay is not quite in this category since the library might choose to arrest or reverse the decay and retain the item, while judgement clearly requires other issues to be considered and may even override the objective criteria.

In assessing these criteria for deselection, there can be a problem where it is assumed that the entirety of the collections is to be treated uniformly. It should be clear that different criteria must be used for different parts of the collections. For example, age may be a reason for relegation from an undergraduate collection, but a reason for retention in a history of science collection. At the extremes, the library either relies on the subject expertise of academic and/or library staff or it uses mechanical criteria such as evidence of use from circulation reports. This becomes increasingly possible with the development of management information systems for library computers, as described in Chapter 4. In the former case, the practicality of persuading several academic staff to reach agreement on withdrawing large numbers of books is quite disproportionately time-consuming. An unpublished study of a weeding exercise at King's College London is perhaps illuminating ¹⁸. The preclinical collections, which had not been weeded for some time, were examined by two staff from each of the pre-clinical departments. It required twenty hours of academic and library staff time to identify 360 volumes of outdated multiple copy textbooks - some 5.7 per cent of the open access collection - remove them from the shelves, and amend the catalogue entries. Over 40 per cent of the time involved was academic staff time. To repeat this feat across the whole library, for what is perhaps the easiest material to weed, would require the equivalent of one halftime post at senior lecturer level. Since the largest element of the cost lies in the examination of the stock, the cost increases significantly when the percentage of stock weeded falls.

Who selects material for relegation?

The literature is full of careless use of the notion of involving academic staff, as though their judgement were any more general and objective than any other group of individuals. Except in the very rarest of cases, the way in which academic staff specialize reduces rather than enhances their ability to assist in a general weeding exercise. Perhaps the key for the library is that proposed by Routh ¹⁹ to evaluate the advisers rather than the collections. To use library subject specialists assumes a staff structure decreasingly available to libraries. Conversely, to apply criteria, such as current levels of circulation and use, mechanically, negates a fundamental tenet of academic librarianship that libraries perform the role of Janus, looking to anticipate and guard the needs of the future as well as relying on the evidence of the past. This becomes a little easier once a library has a collection development policy. Few libraries would now aspire to, far less be in, a position to afford universality of collections. At its crudest it is then possible to define major collecting areas where little or nothing but duplicates will be weeded, and teaching collections where use or obsolescence are valid decision-support criteria. There is a large literature on collection weeding methodologies. The techniques which it describes are many and various, but all have to address the issue of whether the weeding is qualitative or quantitative, using objective criteria ²⁰.

Possibly the largest and most savage stock editing programmes for many years have taken place within the University of London, where the constituent colleges of the University have spent the last five years undergoing a precipitate and radical process of reorganization and merger. Inevitably, similar libraries have been merged and it has proved desirable to rebalance collections through the elimination of duplication and a redefinition of collecting policy. The sheer scale of these exercises has resulted in a very wide range of staff involvement, from relatively junior - but often very experienced - library assistants to library managers more concerned with political issues than stock details. In some cases the process has been simplified by being confined to the disposal of duplicate stock; in others the process of disengaging the stock relating to a transferring department, without damaging the interests of related departments who may be staying in the institution, has proved fraught. Thus in addition to the issue of selecting particular items of stock, the political process has also produced a set of principles for determining the transfer of stock between institutions, to be used when agreement through negotiation has not proved possible. Ironically, the general experience appears to be that the staff of the two libraries between which the transfer is taking place fairly readily reach agreement on what it is practical and sensible to transfer. The involvement of academic staff almost inevitably, and certainly acrimoniously, leads to the sort of difficulties and recriminations which require the imposition of the principles ²¹. It is also often the case that, after a due division of stock, the truly contentious areas which remain concern a few hundred pounds worth of books, some of them available in print and some of which the library would probably have rejected if offered as a gift.

Stock disposal is dangerous ground which can arouse fierce passions. The recent experience of the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester demonstrates the obloquy which can attach to a major stock-disposal programme, no matter how well intentioned. Every library disposes of stock, sometimes unintentionally through theft or accident, sometimes through the transfer or sale of collections to other institutional libraries, sometimes through weeding. Heaney ²² has stressed the importance of preparing a policy on disposal which is approved at the highest level within the institution, preferably before it becomes an issue, and this is undoubtedly sound advice.

Although there has been a great deal of discussion in the literature of why, whether and how to select material for disposal and of who should undertake the activity, the literature is virtually bare of advice on how to dispose of material which no one questions should go. The evidence of this lack of thought is clear in almost all large libraries, where stores steadily silt up with a mixture of unwanted gifts, unprocessed bequests, withdrawn stock, items transferred from branches suffering from space shortages, material awaiting preservation, and perhaps a few bits of special collections. Edinburgh University Library developed and described a policy for controlling disposal over a decade ago ²³ and its main points are worth repeating. Stock disposal should be assigned firmly to one department and be treated as a core activity. Since it is also a revenue generating activity it should be given adequate resources rather than be seen as a chore and in some libraries it may even prove to be self-financing quite quickly. In Edinburgh's case the responsibility for the work lay in the Acquisitions Department, which in effect bore the library's collection-management responsibilities. A critical element is that the management of the stores must be vested in one place. There is a tendency to treat storage areas as common property, which is why they are rarely well managed. If one section has the responsibility for booking material in and out and for assigning space in appropriate areas of store, it is unlikely that over time the library will find that it possesses miscellaneous collections of books of uncertain status and unknown worth. Edinburgh also felt the need to have an agreed set of policies approved by Library Committee in order to protect staff in what is a sensitive area. The need to dispose of some material unobtrusively is also pointed out. One of the laws of librarianship unmentioned by Ranganathan is that, of any pile of books placed in a skip for disposal, one or more will be returned to the library the next day by someone who thinks that he is preventing a tragedy.

Staff structures

Discussions of the staffing and management of resources for acquisitions are rare in the British professional literature, but less so in North America. Bloomfield ²⁴ ascribes this to an amiable mistrust of modern management theory. There is certainly little outside the North American literature to act as a guide.

Team approach

Bryant ²⁵ has discussed some of the difficulties with the team approach to collection management. There is a major problem in managing personnel who support different subject disciplines, for although the tasks performed are common, assessing productivity is a much more difficult exercise. Yet such issues have to be addressed if there is to be an equitable distribution of the workload. It is also important to determine priorities for the whole collection management team and not leave these to the independent and differing judgements of a series of individuals, leading to fairly anarchic management of the collections. Further, the goals and targets which are set must be attainable or morale can suffer. Woodhead ²⁶ cites the possibly typical subject specialist at the University of Leeds who felt that “fulfilment of all the duties was an ideal impossible to attain owing to lack of time”. This is a common complaint and Bryant ²⁷ pinpoints the lack of clear evidence on how much time libraries either do or should spend on collection management - this despite the voluminous American literature - and argues that collection development staff must be more assertive in raising the topic through professional organizations and professional literature. She is not in favour of matrix management structures, which are seen as a response to shrinking library staffs rather than a positive attempt to manage the collections more effectively. If the enthusiasm to raise the profile of collection management through the creation of both a theoretical and a practical base for discussion is laudable, the criticism of this style of staff structure seems needlessly prescriptive. No structure can be said to have emerged as normal or even desirable in North America. A survey of seven ty members of the Association of Research Libraries ²⁸ describes collection development as an 'organizational step-child' with almost as many structures as libraries surveyed.but with a growing perception of the importance of collection management, usually associated with the allocation of responsibility for collection management at a senior level.

Collection management must not be viewed as a series of narrowly defined and isolated tasks which are the preserve of subject specialists. It has become increasingly pervasive of all library activities and will increasingly demand involvement from all professional staff. Many tasks make up the activity: planning and policy development; collection analysis; materials selection; collection maintenance, including both weeding and preservation activity; budgetary management; liaison with users; resource sharing; appraisal of results.²⁹ Although many staffing patterns have emerged in North America there are perhaps fewer options for British academic libraries. Smaller libraries, smaller budgets and smaller staffs will almost inevitably prevent a clear division of labour and require staff to be more versatile in their range of duties.

Creth ³⁰describes a model which avoids the two extremes of subject specialization and a purely functional organization described earlier. She cites Drucker ³¹ who analyses functional organizations. Their great strength lies in stability, clarity and a high degree of economy. Over time this turns to rigidity, lack of communication between functions and growing inefficiency.

Functional approach

The functional approach involves arranging the work in stages and moving the work to where the staff with the appropriate skills are. This is essentially to treat the work as a sort of assembly line product and in research libraries that is a reasonable model of how many systems operate. Even in reader services where there is not such a visible product as in technical services, departments tend to operate in vertical structures with insufficient communication between groups. Drucker ³¹ argues that, nevertheless, such a structure can work in small organizations in a stable environment. Creth points out that neither of these conditions obtains at present in higher education and research libraries.

Subject specialization

Subject specialization in its purest form assigns to an individual member of staff, usually with relevant subject knowledge, all the library tasks associated with a particular subject area, but with more routine tasks performed by junior assistants. Book selection, budget control, reader instruction, departmental liaison and teaching, reference work and collection management fall to an individual. This structure is seen as more receptive to the needs of users; problems or issues which straddle traditional departmental boundaries can be treated in a holistic way; it provides a single point where all library problems can be directed; it is a more professionally satisfying job. On the other hand, when universities have perhaps fifty departments and libraries but only a dozen professional subject specialists, the system either has to provide inequitable treatment or assign up to half a dozen subjects to an individual. It is difficult to see how the notion of specialization can be sustained in such circumstances. Equally, paragons are not as common as such a system assumes. Almost inevitably, the specialist will favour one activity over another. Some are accused of avoiding readers and concentrating on book selection; others are accused of spending all their time in departments and not contributing to the library. The structure which results is a necklace, with the librarian in solitary splendour at the centre, rather than the traditional pyramid. This provides the added disadvantage that it is difficult for subject specialists to demonstrate the traditional administrative skills which lead to promotion. ³²

Creth sees collection management as spanning the activities of many of the traditional functional departments and argues that this justifies a team-based approach. Such a management approach is in any case best able to provide the flexibility and innovation required in the dynamic environment which higher education occupies at present. The university itself operates around subject disciplines organized into groups and these can offer the proper model for the library to follow. One senior member of staff should be assigned the role of collection manager with the task of implementing policy, assigning priorities, budget control and staff development and training. Major areas such as humanities or social sciences - broadly the faculties - should have a librarian working to the collection manager, with delegated responsibilities for their own area. Each subject area would then have its own team of librarians drawn from functional departments and having relevant subject or language skills. The subject teams would work together on all aspects of library affairs to do with the subject area. The advantage is that the library focuses all its relevant subject expertise on an area, while library staff benefit from different views and new information. They use the professional skills in which they are strongest, but always within the context of the team. This also improves communication between the functional areas of the library. The doubts over such a structure are: that collection management will have the Cinderella status of a subsidiary duty; that not enough time will be assigned to the task; that staff and their managers will resent giving time away from their main tasks. These arguments essentially relate to the culture of the organization. Improved horizontal communication and the variety provided through working away from the 'home base' can be seen as benefits to staff if treated positively. In larger organizations the structure can be pressed even further so that within the traditional functional departments which remain, staff can be organized in traditional subject groups which mirror the new collection management structure. This provides a much more fluid organizational structure which can be difficult to manage. But such matrix management operates in all sorts of organizations and there is no obvious reason why library managers should be considered any less able than those in industry or commerce to deal with intricate relationships.

Although this model is put forward as a desirable one, each library must make decisions on how to manage collections in the light of the staffing resources which are available. These will differ over time and between libraries, but it is always the acumen, skill and professional judgement of librarians which will build the collections by which libraries will be remembered.

References

1. University Grants Committee (1976), Capital provision for university libraries: report of a working party [Chairman; Professor R. Atkinson], London: HMSO.

2. Woodhead, P.A. and J.V. Martin (1982), 'Subject specialisation in British university libraries: a survey', Journal of Librarianship, 14, 93-108.

3. Letter of 11 May 1935. Library Archives, King's College London.

4. Peasgood, A.N. (1988), Acquisition/selection librarians - academic libraries. Bibliographic records in the book world: needs and capabilities: proceedings of a seminar held on 27-28 November 1987, at Newbury, London: BNB Research Fund.

5. Broude,.J. (1978), 'journal deselection in an academic environment: a comparison

of faculty and librarian choices', Serials librarian, 3,147-66.

6. Bloomfield, B.C. (1988), 'Collection development: the key issues', in S. Corrall (ed.) Collection development: options for effective management, London: Taylor Graham.

7. Gorman, G.E. and B.R. Howes (1989), Collection development for libraries, London: Bowker-Saur.

8. Cargill,.J. (1984), 'Collection development policies: an alternative viewpoint',

Library acquisitions: practice and theory, 8, 47-49.

9. Great Britain, Department of Education and Science, Office of Arts and Libraries

(1982), The future development of libraries and information services. 1. The organisational and policy framework 2. Working together within a national framework London: HMSO.

Great Britain, Department of Education and Science, Office of Arts and Libraries

(1986), The future development of libraries and information services: progress through planning and partnership. Report by the Library and Information Services Council (Library information series no.14), London: HMSO.

10, Pocklington, K and H, Finc.h (1987), Research collections under constraint, (British Library research paper, 36), London: British Library.

11, Stam, D.H. (1983) ‘Think globally, act locally: collection development and resource sharing', Collection building, 5, p.21

12, Dougherty, RM. (1988), 'A conceptual framework for organizing resource sharing

and shared collection development programmes',]ournal of academic librarianship,

14, 287~291.

13. Jestes, E. and W.D. I,aird, (1968), 'A time study of general reference work in a university library', Research in librarianship, 2, 9-16.

14. Wheeler, J and H. Goldhor, (1962), Practical administration of public libraries. New York: Harper and Row.

15, Thompson, J (1982), The end of libraries. London: Bingley.

16. Ash, I. (1963), Yale's selective book retirement program, Hamden: Linnett Books,

17. Ford, G. (1988), 'A review of relegation practice', in S. Corrall (ed.), ref. 6,

18. Information from an unpublished study conducted by P. Rigby, Deputy Librarian,

King's College London Library.

19, Routh, S, (1984), 'Storage and discard' in Collection management in academic libraries. 'Papers delivered at a national seminar, Surfers Paradise Queensland 16-17^th February 1984. Library Association of Australia.

20. A good basic guide to the literature is to be found in: A.D. Jarred, (1987),'The one minute collection manager', Collection Management, 9, 5-12.

21. LRCC Paper (1990), presented to the Advisory Board of Librarians.

22. Heaney, H. (1988), 'The University Research Library', in S, Corrall (ed.), ref. 6.

23. Law, D.G. (1983), 'Managing a stock disposal programme', in J. R. Guild (ed.),

Methods of exchange and disposal of stock. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Library,

24, Bloomfield, B.C. (1989), 'How can collection development and management be

most effectively organized and staffed?' in Collections: their development, management, preservation and sharing. Papers from the joint meeting of the Association of Research Libraries and the Standing Conference of National and University libraries, University of York September 19-22, 1988. Washington: Association of Research Libraries.

25. Bryant, B. (1986), 'Allocation of human resources for collection development',

Library resources & technical services, 30, 149-162.

26. Woodhead, P. (1974). 'Subject specialisation in three British University Libraries:

a critical survey', Libri, 24, 30-60.

27. Bryant, B. (1987), 'The organizational structure of collection development', Library resources & technical services, 31, 111-122.

28. Sohn, J, (1987), 'Collection development organizational patterns in ARL Libraries', Library resources & technical services, 31, 123-134.

29. Cogswell, J.A. (1987), 'The organization of collection management functions in

academic research libraries' Journal of academic librarianship, 13, 268-276.

30. Creth, S. (1989), 'The organization of collection development: a shift in the

organization paradigm'. in Collections, ref. 24.

31. Drucker, P. (1974), Management: Tasks, responsibilities, practices. New York: Harper.

32. Thompson, J. and R. Carr (1987), An introduction to university library administration. 4th ed., London: Bingley.