The Wonders of Collection Development

I attended a training the other day that focused on the ins and outs of collection development (those who are unaware of what collection development is should click here. Those who are savvy with their library lingo can parenthetical interruption and continue reading). Overall the training was interesting and helpful in my quest to librarianship. I have recently taken on the task of collection development for ages 0-3 (I must say it is an interesting area of development...) which is one of the main reasons I attended the class. One of the first things that was introduced was Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science which are:
1) Books are for use
2) Every reader his book
3) Every book its reader
4) Save the time of the reader
5) A library is a growing organism

This sparked my interests considerably. I wondered: Who was Ranganthan? Unfortunately I'm not going to answer that right now, never fear, I will talk about him in a future post. Anyway, the five laws are important. Then we went on to talk factors of a collection: Components of Collection Management
-Evaluate
-Plan
-Fund
-Build
-Organize
-Provide access
-Market

Evaluation of a collection
-Enough? Too much?
-Collection level
-Age
-Usage
-Demand
-Average price
-Loss rate
-Physical condition
-Access

This was all fun and exciting...Then we spoke of how budget affects the development of a libraries collection (interesting because of the current state of library budgets). This 20% is divided up among all of the materials for all age groups based on the population served at the library. The population served is one of the biggest things. A population of older adults is not going to be reading Manga, so, that would be a bad collection development decision.

It was a long workshop so this is just a quick gist of it. More can be found at the ALA website.

Some interesting websites that were pointed out for collection development:

http://www.lib.az.us/cdt/

http://www.overbooked.org/index.html

http://www.metacritic.com/

These are mainly sites about upcoming books.