Is There a Future for Collection Development Librarians?

Abstract

With many academic libraries making use of approval plans and demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) the traditional role of the Collection Development Librarian is changing and diminishing. But is this really true? I will describe the areas of collection building and management that still need to be carried out by a librarian. I will also identify those tasks that a Collection Development Librarian no longer needs to perform. Finally, I will consider the future direction of collection building in different types of academic libraries and will suggest new roles for the library in this process. The objective of this session is to initiate a dialog about the role of collection development in the electronic age. Members of the audience will be encouraged to share practices and policies from their institutions and to brainstorm about new roles and responsibilities for librarians. Attendees will leave the session with a better understanding of current collection development practices and a stronger awareness of the central role a Collection Development Librarian can play. I have been an academic librarian for 35 years, and for the past 10 of those years I have been primarily responsible for collection development. I work at Franklin and Marshall College (F&M) in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. F&M is a traditional small liberal arts college with a student body of around 2,300. It is an undergraduate institution with no distance learning programs and no MOOCs—yet. The library currently has over 500,000 books and access to thousands of journals in full text through a variety of databases. F&M is also a selective depository for U.S. federal documents. In short, we have a lot of stuff, and we are running out of space for all of this print material, like many other libraries. Because of this, we are now acquiring ebooks and have started an ongoing weeding project. As the collection development librarian, I have been in the thick of planning these activities, and I envision such projects to have an increasing demand on my time. I will be retiring in a few years so this is probably a good time to reflect on how my job has changed over these 10 years. I am doing some things differently than I did 10 years ago, and the collection decision-making process will probably change even more before I retire. So what has been changing? The librarians and the faculty at F&M still select most of the materials for the library, but that percentage is slowly decreasing. Why? There are two explanations for this trend. One is an expanding approval plan for books largely published by major university presses. Our initial small plan has exploded to 39 publishers. Two of those, Oxford and Cambridge, are limited to American and British literature titles as well as philosophy books. Several other presses are also restricted to philosophy. I expect that other subject areas will probably participate in the plan in the near future. The second reason is the introduction of e-books into the library’s collection. Academic libraries have reported varying degrees of success and satisfaction with e-book titles and packages. We have been slow (and very cautious) in pursuing ebooks at F&M, but we now have purchased several collections that seem to complement our print holdings. These include EBSCO (7,000 titles), Springer (34,000), and Project MUSE (1,000). Additionally, we have access to over 75,000 titles in the Early American Imprints and several fulltext reference sources. In the realm of patrondriven acquisitions (PDA), we started with a modest MyiLibrary package from Coutts and plan to expand that collection. We recently added records for 3,000 titles from JSTOR’s PDA offerings. Very few e-books have been used or “purchased” at F&M, so the jury is still out on this experiment.