Course Overview

Welcome to collection and connection development! During this course, we will explore the process of selecting materials to best serve the needs of today's library users.

This class will push the envelope of traditional ideas about collection development. Some ideas will not match what is done in any current library. Our purpose is to confront what a true 21st century collection might look like in various types of libraries. Thus, during class, we will share what is happening in the libraries you are studying, entertain radical ideas, and think about collections from the user's perspective rather than the convenience of the librarian.

The collection mapping study you do by completing this course will become a great addition to not only the e-portfolio for our School of Information, but also as a portfolio to a prospective or current employer as evidence of what you know, what you can do, and what you deeply understand about collection and connection development.

A Real Library Collection

To complete the assignments in this course, you need to study an actual library collection. If you are not employed in a library, then find a library or part of a library collection to study. You need to ask permission to study the collection if you are not in charge of it.

Sometimes, library administrators do not want the collection you are studying to be named in your assignment. In this case, you can write it up as a fictional collection such as "in a large public library..."

You may study a reasonably-sized collection in a public library, a school library, or a special collection of some type. If you want to study a larger library, you need to choose a part of the collection to study. For example, you could study the American History collection at Stanford University.

You could also combine efforts or team up with a person already in a library and assist them in the study of their collection.

You are required to obtain a large amount of data for these assignments. Sometimes, you will not be able to get exact figures about the collection. In this case you will need to fictionalize the data, but try to make reasonable estimates of the collection you are studying.

Assignments

With the data gathered from your chosen library, you will create a series of seven presentations about that library's collection and your recommendations for improvement. Your presentations will be posted for your classmates to review and discuss during our class Workshops.

Instructions for each presentation can be found on their respective pages, which can be navigated to through the menu at the top of the page.

Throughout the semester, you will also be required to supplement your understanding of collection development through reading assignments. Take notes from your textbook and from relevant outside materials. Share articles you find with peers on the Course Blog.

Please see the Assignments page for more instruction details, due dates, and point values.

For helpful tips and online tools to use when completing your assignments, please refer to the Tools and Tutorials page.

Other Notes

We will be experimenting with various forms of collaborative knowledge building. Thus, sometimes, you will be making a presentation for direct submission to the professor. At other times, you will be collecting data about your collection and then combining it with other data in the class session to look across various libraries for patterns and trends. For these later collaborative efforts, you will need to be prepared before class with your own data.

We will also be experimenting with various techniques for creating infographics of our work. This will require the creative efforts of everyone as we all learn how to use data visualization techniques in collection development and in many other aspects of library work. You will need the 3rd edition of the textbook because it contains many helpful examples.