Competency F
Collection Development
Collection Development
Use the basic concepts and principles related to the selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation of physical and digital information items.
Introduction
Competency F tells me that as an information professional, I must understand and be able to execute all of the necessary functions for managing and maintaining my institution’s collection. Whether the resources be books, periodicals, databases entries, videos, or other, I must know how to evaluate and select new and existing materials, how to organize the resources, and how to preserve them, all with the institution’s mission and audience in mind.
Selection and Evaluation
Selecting and evaluating resources for a collection is not an exact science. One thing in particular my classes taught me to be aware of when evaluating and selecting resources for a collection is bias. This means the bias both within the resource itself and on the part of the person performing the selection.
Every resource is the product of numerous decisions, including but by no means limited to the nature of the content, the depth and breadth of the content’s scope, the language/word choice employed, the format of the resource, and the classification/categorization of the resource. The people responsible both for creating and selecting the resource might make every decision as objectively as possible, but they are still subject to their own biases that are unavoidably reflected in the resource or collection. Furthermore, both creators and selectors must make their decisions based upon assumptions about their target audience, and these assumptions might or might not prove to be false, but in any case they won’t apply equally to every single audience member.
The most powerful weapon for countering bias is a selection policy. This is the institution’s document that spells out what the purpose of the collection is and what it comprises, and it provides direction for those responsible for evaluating materials for selection. This direction typically comes in the form of procedures for consideration and reconsideration, and a list of criteria for adding specific resources. The American Library Association (ALA, 2018) advises that “The criteria should be a blend of general, specific, and technical to enable library staff to select materials in all subject areas and formats” (para. 1). The policy will also often include an overarching guiding principle of supporting the institution’s mission and serving its patrons, with perhaps a mention of representing a wide variety of viewpoints. This latter would follow the ALA’s (2019) guidance that “A diverse collection should contain content by and about a wide array of people and cultures to authentically reflect a variety of ideas, information, stories, and experiences” (para. 1).
Evaluation and selection are not just for adding new resources to a collection. In my coursework I learned that it is also important to be able to evaluate the existing collection both to be able to better judge if a new resource is worth adding or would be redundant, and to cull from the collection resources that are no longer of value, due to being outdated, in poor condition, or underused.
Organization
Adding resources to a collection is just the first step. Now those resources must be made discoverable and accessible. This is where organization comes in. My coursework taught me that I must approach organization methodically and, again, with thorough knowledge of the collection’s user groups and their information-seeking behaviors.
I also learned that while there are overlapping principles of organization between physical and digital collections, there is one important difference in particular. With physical collections, a single resource can only be in one physical location, and so there is only one way (at any given time) to organize the collection. Digital items, meanwhile, have no single location, and so their collections can be organized in many different ways. All of them must make sense to the user group, though.
Bias can infect organization as well, and my courses taught me to be well aware of how political, religious, and social views can come into play during the organization process. The ALA provides guidance in this area via interpretations of the Library Bill of Rights. One is the Religion in American Libraries interpretation, which tells librarians that they must be viewpoint-neutral when it comes to shelving religious books, displaying religious objects, and providing access to religious websites (American Library Association, 2016, para. 7). Other interpretations speak to other aspects of organization, such as labeling and barriers to access.
Lastly, I learned that organization should be an ongoing consideration because collection items, user demographics and behaviors, and technology all change over time, and with them, the user-collection relationship.
Preservation
To ensure the longevity of a collection such that patrons years and even generations from now can still reap its benefits, it is necessary to preserve the collection’s resources. In the last few decades, this has largely come to mean digitizing records so that even if the physical original is lost, patrons might still derive some knowledge or value from the surrogate.
My coursework taught me the significance of developing and implementing a carefully planned and equipped digitization scheme, one tailored specifically to the collection’s materials. Preservation and digitization are not synonymous, but they do often go hand-in-hand. Purcell (2016) wrote, “The concept of greater access to information has guided many digitization efforts, especially in academic libraries” (p. 4). Even when access is the goal of a digitization project, however, a side benefit is preservation. Likewise, if the goal is access not only for today’s patrons but for tomorrow’s as well, then consideration must be given to how those future uses will access the digital files. As Purcell further noted, “Planning for future information needs is tricky, especially with fast technological changes” (p. 3). In might be impossible to future-proof a collection, but digitizing according to widely accepted technologies and standards can help.
All of this talk of digitization is not to diminish the continued importance of preserving physical resources. Digitization technology is still not at the point of being able to completely replicate physical originals in every aspect. Virtual reality, haptic feedback, and other innovations might someday make this possible. Even if preservationists could eventually create a digital surrogate with complete fidelity, though, there will still be value in preserving the original, if only from a historical or even emotional standpoint.
Evidence
Evidence 1: INFO 234 Intellectual Freedom – Resource Selection
For this resource selection assignment for my course in intellectual freedom, I had to find and analyze real resource selection and reconsideration sections of collection development policies from two libraries of the same type. I chose two public libraries, and explained how the policies approached selection guidance and procedures for library staff, access for library users, and implicit and explicit messaging to those users. I also examined how well the policies followed the ALA’s recommendations for selection policies, as spelled out in the organization’s “Workbook for Selection Policy Writing” document.
For the reconsideration portion of the assignment, I discussed how clear the policies made it for library patrons and staff members to understand the institution’s philosophy and protocols for reconsidering materials in the collection. I described the process that patrons must go through to challenge material, as well as other policy aspects such as who has standing to bring a challenge and whether or not the library requires that person or group to have read/viewed/listened to the entire work before bringing a challenge.
This assignment made me confident that I can evaluate an existing or develop a new collection development policy that is clear and coherent for library staff and patrons. It highlighted principles to be aware of such as access and challenges to materials, and it exposed me to examples of actual criteria libraries have set for selecting materials. Finally, it made me aware of resources such as the ALA’s workbook that I can use in developing a policy in a future library position.
Evidence 2: INFO 200 Information Communities – Information Sources Survey
This assignment had me consider different sources of materials that a particular information community might find interesting or useful. The community I chose was comics and comic book fans, and the sources I selected were the Encyclopedia of Black Comics and CBR, a website formerly known as Comic Book Resources. I learned that a librarian should be aware of community-based resources such as CBR in order to be able to recommend them to members of that information community, but it is equally if not more valuable to be able to provide materials such as the Encyclopedia of Black Comics that community members might not be able to access elsewhere.
This assignment also shows that, when considering a resource for addition to a collection, I can assess it critically by examining myriad factors including where the resource falls in the information cycle, its scope and content, its author’s authority and reliability, its currency, and its biases and gaps. Being able to perform an evaluation of this type will help me choose materials that both are of interest and use to the information community and that best match my institution’s selection criteria.
Evidence 3: INFO 284 Archives and Research Management: Digitization and Digital Preservation – ContentDM Online Collection
This group digitization project gave me a chance to practice several aspects of collection building and management. For our collection we decided upon pen pal correspondence sent to one individual during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to building the collection in the ContentDM web-based content management application, we defined our target user group as sociologists and others researching life during the pandemic, and with some secondary audiences such as teachers and those interested in practicing or studying pen-paling. We then evaluated and selected letters and postcards that we felt represented the collection theme and thus would be of interest to that audience. In this video presentation for the project, we also talked about how the size of the scanner we had access to affected which materials we could select for digitization—a technical limitation of a nature that I could well face in a future job.
We discuss other digitization and preservation themes in the video as well, such as copyright considerations, scanning, and improving discoverability through metadata, full-text search, and controlled vocabularies. In the final part of the video walkthrough of the collection, we show how we organized the materials in different ways, and that we surfaced what we determined to be the most useful fields for this audience—subject and date—in the preview for each resource.
Overall, this video displays my ability to work on a collection project that requires me to think about it holistically from the standpoints of audience needs and behaviors, resource selection, organization, and preservation. It shows that I am able to work with a group to plan out such a project and then to put that plan into action to build a useful and well-constructed collection for the target user group.
Conclusion
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO, 2016) wrote, “There are no absolute rules for creating good digital collections” (How to Use section, para. 1), and the same can be said for physical collections. Rather, NISO advised, the best route is “to plan strategically and make wise choices from an array of tools and processes to support the unique goals and needs of each collection” (How to Use section, para. 2). My coursework made me aware of many of those tools and processes, especially the collection policy, and equipped me to plan a collection by teaching me the principles and practices of selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation.
References
American Library Association. (2016, June 28). Religion in American libraries: An interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/religion
American Library Association. (2018, January). Selection criteria. http://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit/criteria
American Library Association. (2019, June 24). Diverse collections: An interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/diversecollections
Deal, L. (2015). Visualizing digital collections. Technical Services Quarterly, 32(1), 14–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/07317131.2015.972871
National Information Standards Organization. (2016). Framework of guidance for building good digital collections. http://framework.niso.org/7.html
Purcell, A. D. (2016). Digital library programs for libraries and archives: Developing, managing, and sustaining unique digital collections. Neal-Schuman.